Noelle likes Good Food

The garden is growing! What a wonderful time of year :). A friend gave me a new houseplant. In a jelly mold pan! I believe it is a non-edible type of purslane.  My herbs are overrunning the beds and I have been harvesting lots of dill, basil, parsley and oregano for sauces and zucchini cakes. Next on my list is to make a few big batches of pesto to freeze.  The bees are buzzing around my anise hyssop plant. Yay for friendly pollinators! The cucumbers vines got attacked by a hungry deer. But it looks like they are trying to recover. Hopefully I will still get cucumbers. The deer also got my okra, peppers, and one of my sweet potato plants. Any suggestions for keeping the deer away?  Despite the deer, my zucchini and tomato plants are doing great! Everything is a jumble of green. TOMATOES!  The sweet potato plant that has survived so far. Hopefully the deer will stay away from this one.  A friend...

Today I want to talk about lacto-fermentation. You may or may not know what it is, so let's start there.  The gist is that you take any kind of vegetable and chop it up, add salt and sometimes a little bit of water and let it ferment for anywhere between 3 days-4 weeks. The salt in the recipe kills off the bad bacteria, but there are good gut-friendly lactic acid bacteria that can survive the salt solution. The lactic acid bacteria (LAB's) feed off the sugars in the veggies and produce lactic acid and a whole bunch of probiotics that help to repopulate our gut with beneficial bacteria and sway our gut culture in the right direction :). Also, the process of lacto-fermentation preserves the veggies without having to use any heat (I've had batches of kimchi and sauerkraut last for months in the fridge and it just gets better with age). Also, fermentation makes the nutrients already present in the vegetables more bioavailable. Meaning when we eat fermented veggies our bodi...

Yesterday was a great day. I spent the morning volunteering at an Organic Medicinal Herb Garden that is run through my university and harvested some herbs for making tinctures. Then I came home and harvested some garden vegetables and herbs and spent the rest of the day experimenting in the kitchen. Those are my favorite kind of days :).   This is somewhat of a tangent but something I have been thinking about lately. I have realized that I struggle with living in the present because all I can think about is the future. I think about what I want to accomplish and learn and can easily get overwhelmed by all the things I wish I was/could be doing RIGHT NOW. Since there is never going to be an infinite amount of time or an infinite amount of energy I realize I must work more at being present.  Something that I know helps to ground me is by working out in the garden. It has a way of bringing the here and now into focus. I can only think about what can be harvested and used...

Happy Summer everyone! We have had some crazy weather here in Georgia, but things are heating up and the garden is doing great! Lots of exciting things have happened since we talked last. My husband got accepted into a masters program at UGA and started classes a couple of days ago. He will be taking 2 classes a semester (summer, fall, spring) for the next 2 years. I am very proud of him. Also, we left for a week to go on a vacation! The vacation was absolutely wonderful. We got to hang out with family and went on a cruise. We spent lots of time at the beach, soaking up the sun, swimming in the ocean, and of course eating lots of delicious food. I couldn't have asked for a better time! I was nervous that my newly planted garden would suffer in my absence, but my fears were unfounded. We got back on Monday and I was surprised and delighted to see that everything was thriving and growing. There are lots of updates in this post, so first I will show you pictures of the garden be...