Summer Delights

The garden is such a magical place despite mine being overgrown and full of weeds. This year I've made a bigger effort into growing more veggies that we could use in our family meals. It's been about four or five years since I've grown snowpeas, so it's a real accomplishment that I actually have a small harvest of both round and flat snowpeas.
My strawberry rhubarb has continued to thrive in its present location next to the fig tree. I've already used it in a coffee cake and a rhubarb bar recipe back in June, so instead of making a pie (which I was too tired to make yesterday), I made a simple rhubarb compote using 6 cups of chopped rhubarb, 1 cup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of grated orange rind, and 1/4 cup of water. I involved the boys by teaching them how to de-string rhubarb stalks, which they had fun doing after a light duel with the rhubarb stalks as though they were swords. The compote turned out great and will be delicious with vanilla ice-cream or even just toast in the morning! I can just see myself making more compote and preserves in the future as my strawberry freezer jam turned out so scrumptious as well this year.

My First Rhubarb Pie

During the first year we moved into the house (which was six years ago), I bought some strawberry rhubarb root divisions from Van Dusen Gardens' Seedy Saturday to plant in our garden. The first couple of years I couldn't understand why I didn't get any growth out of these plants. These were supposed to be easy, low maintenance plants to grow, I thought. We eventually just concluded that the rhubarb plants were probably unhappy in its location, so M dug them up and moved them next to the fig tree. That was about three years ago, and finally, we now have some healthy big strawberry rhubarb with great big leaves growing in my garden from which I made my first rhubarb pie this past Sunday. I'm happy to say that it turned out delicious--tart, but not too lip-puckering tart. I used this recipe. And I used the standard pastry recipe from my mom's old Five Roses cookbook with my own addition of some freshly grated orange rind.

Finally it's Spring!

You Belong in Spring

Optimistic, lively, and almost always happy with the world... You can truly appreciate the blooming nature of spring. Whether you're planting flowers or dyeing Easter eggs, spring is definitely your season!

What Season Are You?

Well, it sure doesn't feel like spring with the downpour of rain that Vancouver keeps receiving these past few days. There's hardly enough light to take decent photos! I've been thinking about germinating seedlings though. Here's what I'm thinking of filling up my garden with this year...SUNFLOWERS! And I want the big two metre ones! I want to transform the "feel" of my backyard this year with a lot of clean-up and more flowers. If the sunflowers work out, I can create more privacy and somewhat block out that rusty old station wagon/eye sore parked in our neighbour's backyard.

Currently, I'm furiously working on keep up inventory for my store in between feeding the kids, laundry, picking up toys, and work. The two boys, shown here with their recent haircuts from the barber's, are fighting to climb up their bunkbed. We've been working on getting the two of them to sleep in their own rooms by redecorating their rooms with a new bunkbed and some nifty storage bin systems from IKEA. So far so good, the two of them sleep through most of the night. They occasionally walk over to our room in the middle of the night without so much as a peep and scare the bejeezus out of me, but other than that, we've not had a mental breakdown......yet.