You Like Tomato and I Like Tomahto...

So we have planted this little garden in the middle of the desert and actually managed to keep it alive. It has taken lots of water and a ginormous shade umbrella, but by golly it’s growing. We did what is called the square foot garden method. Basically you can plant a different variety in every square foot, which sounded like a great idea for a beginner gardener. So if I kill one plant the others may still have a chance, then I can tell what is easy to grow. We planted corn, tomatoes, strawberries, radishes, green beans, carrots, jalapeños, yellow squash, watermelons, pumpkins, eggplant, snapdragons, peanuts, and sweet peas. So far I can tell you that you plant sweet peas in the cooler months, peanut seeds need to be raw and still have the skin on, and for some reason the eggplant plant hasn’t grown at all. We have harvested the radishes and made a pasta dish out of them. The strawberries we have grown are smaller than the size of a dime and that’s before the ants get to them. Out of our 16 corn plants we have 9 ears growing, more than what I expected. We picked quite a few tomatoes the other day. We were hoping to make some tomato sauce out of them but we didn’t have enough ripe ones. So, we made salsa. All we had from our garden were the tomatoes; we had to go buy everything else. Which really cost a lot more than just buying a jar of salsa, but no one in the family likes to eat tomatoes so we had to use them somehow. Which you may be wondering, if no one likes them then why grown them? Well, we all like tomato sauce and tomatoes in salsa just not tomato slices on our burgers or tomato cubes on our salads. Anyway, Ronnie and I get home with all our stuff to make salsa and we start chopping. Then we chop some more and some more. We are chopping for almost an hour! Finally we are finished and we break out the chips and taste it. It was so good! All our chopping and dicing and mincing had paid off, but next time we are totally breaking out the food processor.