Backyard Farmgals

Jules and I just got back from Colorado.  We went on a wildflower tour with the Extension Department from Utah State University, and it was a blast.  We had so much fun and learned so much!  We toured several gardens and bummed around Fort Collins, Colorado.  We explored the University of Colorado, went to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park to see wildflowers, and drank the best root beer we have ever had!  We saw arboretums and trial gardens, community gardens, formal and informal gardens.  The story is best told through photos, so I thought I would share a few with you... Goodbye polluted Utah!!!  Coming back it was like descending into a brown haze.  We need some wind!   Welcome to Denver - Sunflower fields greeted us!   Denver Botanical Center was our first stop.  The gardens were amazing.  They had several bamboo sculptures made by two artist throughout the garden.  They mirrored the landscape, it w...

Glorious summer!  Part of the fun of the microfarm and CSA is that we get to eat all of the leftovers and weird looking veg.  Anything cracked or blemished, or that there is just too darn much of falls right onto the dinner table.  Today, I had leftover summer squash and some cracked heirloom tomatoes - still good, no reason for them to go to waste.  Plus my little farmhands are wild about tomatoes, they couldn't care what they look like, just as long as they get to munch on them. I came up with this super easy salad as a way to use up some of that wild zucchino rampicante that I told you about in an earlier post .  These squash can be up to 3-feet long, and the weird looking one that I had leftover surpassed that expectation.  I cut the neck in half and used a vegetable peeler to made long thin ribbons.  Kind of fun and ornamental, and the boys will really like it!  Sautéed, they are quite tasty, and this particular squash has a real crea...

Raspberries, creamy filling, crumble topping, and delicate pie crust.  Can you handle this?  Wow!  This is one of those fantastic recipes that I will make each year during the height of raspberry season, yep, it's that good.  I am completely in love! I have to say that the raspberries are the most important piece of this puzzle, it requires very fresh, ripe, and sweet raspberries.  A farmer friend of mine was able to get some glorious little jewels from a farmer friend of his in Oregon yesterday.  These berries are divine, ripened in the sun and carefully picked.  I know that they are not local, but really, they are from a friend of a friend and a small sustainable organic berry farm.  It doesn't get much better than that!  Make sure you get berries grown on a farm that were picked a day or two ago at their peak.  You will have an amazing tasting pie if you do! I switched the original recipe just a bit.  The crust wa...

I love beets.  I love the way they smell, the earthiness of their taste, I even love the way they stain your hands pink.  The problem with beets is that I feel there are so few ways to prepare them, and I think that people get bored with the same old steamed beets.  I love mine roasted with sea salt, olive oil and balsamic, but that heats up the kitchen, and in 100ºF weather, I can do without heating up the kitchen! A friend gave me a recipe for beet salad, and I have given it a bit of a Farmgal makeover, adding a few things, and getting rid of a few ingredients.  This is lovely and fresh.  Best of all, it is raw and requires not one bit of heat (which is good news for my kitchen!).  All you need is a mandolin with a small julienne attachment - just be sure to use the finger guard, those beets are slippery!  My seven-year-old gobbled this down, the four-year-old was a bit more cautious but eventually ate it too.  It's tasty and has definitel...

Luck would have it that I would be called off from my usual job on Friday, which meant an extra day of camping.  We had planned a trip to Moosehorn Lake in the High Uintah's months ago, but only for one night.  Giddy with excitement we threw our stuff into our 1970 Rancho El Rae Camper (It's vintage and oh... so... HOT!), grabbed our dog Paisley, and headed up hoping to find a spot near our reserved spot on Saturday.  Luck found us once again, and we were able to switch our reservation to the spot next door and stay an extra night without moving.  Hooray! Nature made rest stop! Paisley came along for the fun, she loved camping and especially enjoyed hiking. Camping is what my boys live for, they LOVE it!  Wilderness, fishing, hiking, campfires, yummy dinners cooked over a fire, and places for all their endless energy to go!  Camping is something I wish I had more of when I was a kid, but I think I am getting a second chance at that - kind of makin...

Part of this whole Backyard Farmgals gig is that I get to misbehave... often!  Which really, misbehaving comes very easily to me... ask anyone, they will tell you!  I'm bad... I was greeted at the farm this morning by an obscene vegetable.  Really this is the most suggestive vegetable I have ever laid eyes on!  I will show you a picture... you can take it from here!!! An almost 3-foot-long zucchini!  I planted this very odd heirloom variety of climbing zucchini called Zucchino Rampicante which is a cross between a pumpkin and zucchini.  It is a glorious vine, it is covering a teepee trellis at the farm and one of the cattle panel arches over a walkway.  I had checked the squashes on the arch yesterday, they were getting big, but overnight, one of them exploded in length!  I quickly picked the zucchini and went to find Jules... Jules was cleaning Cluckingham Palace while I was supposedly weeding.  Boy was she going to be surprised! ...