Gardening and the Farmers Market

It came to my attention that I never actually posted about having planted my potatoes, and I shall be remedying that right now.

Last week I planted peas, onions and potatoes. This is a bit early for planting potatoes for me but I think that its actually quite alright, I'll just have potatoes earlier. At any rate, I planted All Blues, Reds and Yukon Golds. This is what they looked like before going in the ground.



And Kelley did a lovely job photo-documenting the whole process.







Earlier that day I planted Cascadia Peas around some tomato trellises that were left at the house by Brian.



This past saturday Kelley and I went to the Portland Farmers Market for the first time this spring and oh how my heart soared! I bought lots of greens because, frankly, that's about all there is right now and on a whim bought Swiss Chard. Now, I've never liked Swiss Chard before and have only recently started eating kale and quite honestly, I'm not the biggest brassica fan (broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, collards, kohlrabi, etc). But I bought chard, one small bundle of chard and how I regret only buying a single bundle! The best way that I've discovered for eating chard is this way:



I've experimented with many different varieties of stuffed quesadilla but right now I'm enjoying the basic combination of rice flour tortillas/corn tortillas (naturally gluten-free, huzzah!) with shredded cheese (a pizza cheese mix is good, swiss cheese or a mexican mix is alway good) and greens. At this point I usually add a meat/egg (bacon, egg, sandwich meat) and fry it up just right on the skillet. The first stuffed quesadilla I made by sautéeing the swiss chard with bacon pieces and onions and used swiss. So delicious! At any rate, I ran out of chard the day after I bought it but have been making spinach quesadillas (like the one above, also has scrambled egg, bacon and quattro formaggio pizza cheese). Why am I being so specific? Because you should make this for dinner TONIGHT. It'll totally be worth it, I promise.

I also bought some mizuna, mustard, swiss chard and spinach starts. Today I planted the swiss chard in gallon pots so that even if I take a long time to plant them they can still get bigger and better. The garden is going to be so good this year! It also helps that a lot of the roommates want to be involved and have made an effort to be involved. Hurray!

Also at the PFM I bought fiddleheads which we sautéed and ate with a salad of spinach, watercress and green onions.




All of which we ate with a round steak from the farm co-op. A completely loca(l)vore meal.

Recently we've been enjoying daffodils, and so many different kinds!




They're on their way out as of now but we'll be enjoying more beautiful flowers as summer comes.

Yesterday I finished one of my Toturro mittens. It's not great, my tensioning is really inconsistent and due to that the thumb is really tight. I also ended up with a hole where the thumb connects to the body of the glove. But alas, it is still finished and it is a lesson learned. I don't know if I am going to do the other partner mitten or do something different that would be better or easier to learn better tensioning. We'll see.