the garden: broccoli harvest

So, apparently this is what broccoli looks like when it's growing: 

Maybe you already knew that. I had no idea. When I was in Ohio last month, my dad sent me home with a broccoli plant that he started from seed, which was a nice addition to my garden. I'm not sure it's a vegetable that I would grow again next year. It doesn't make a lot of sense to grow broccoli in my teeny tiny backyard because it takes up valuable real estate that I could be using for more prolific plants, like peppers and tomatoes. But it's been a fun experiment, and the broccoli itself is quite good when it's fresh. I harvested the broccoli last week, and already there's another head growing off the side of the stem, so hopefully we get some more out of this plant.

I had heard you need to wash homegrown broccoli in salt water to kill tiny little bugs that get in the florets. So I did.

But no little bugs floated to the surface, which means either (a) my broccoli was bug-free, or (b) my salt bath failed, and we ate the bugs. Either way, it was good!

the garden: harvest update

The veggies are finally here! Cherry tomatoes. Early Girl tomato. Cucumber. Hot banana pepper. All in my belly. Now we can say summer officially has arrived.

Let's talk cherry tomatoes. Of everything I've eaten out of my garden so far this year, the cherry tomatoes have been the best tasting, hands down. It's like all of the flavor of a big tomato got concentrated into a bite-sized tomato. Next year I've got to figure out how to get, like, 10 cherry tomato plants into my backyard.

But that's not to say the Early Girl tomato wasn't good because it was very good. The main appeal of the Early Girl is that it's the first tomato of the season.

I also picked my first cucumber this week, and it just happens to be my very favorite vegetable. I don't think we could ever have too many cucumbers in the fridge.

And we had our first hot banana pepper, which arrived June 23, ahead of schedule. The label said to expect maturity 75 days after planting, which would've put us at July 12. Bonus!