Gardening Time!

Peppers are a great addition to any summer garden and if you plan well, will save you oodles at the grocery store each summer. In our family we like to plant the standard Bell pepper, with Habanero and Jalapeno peppers to give a little kick to our spaghetti sauce. How many people realize that the variety of colors that Bell peppers are sold in are really the same pepper, but at different points in its life cycle? When Bell peppers are young, they are green then yellow, orange and end up being red when fully ripe. In addition, unlike the peppers you buy in the store, homegrown Bell peppers actually have a delicious taste that grows sweeter as they mature. .....

Zucchini and Summer Squash is probably the most hated garden plant known to man. Who hasn’t had that neighbor who planted a yard full of the stuff and now is chasing, calling and even dropping off bucketfuls of the vegetable to anyone and everyone they know and many they don’t. Zucchini / Summer Squash is one of those easy to grow plants that has the nasty habit of starting off as a cute little flowering plant and ends up being a monster of a plant with baseball bat sized fruit if you are not diligent in your harvesting duties. Despite that everyone should have a bit of zucchini or summer squash in their garden, the trick we must learn is not to plant too much or you will suffer the consequences. ....

Sweet potatoes are a staple at most Thanksgiving dinners, but how many of us actually eat them at any other time of the year. I would think that many would not, unless someone else prepared them, but it may be time to reconsider. Sweet potatoes were once a staple throughout most of the southeast, but after the Great Depression, it was considered a hard times food and lost it popularity as standard of livings increased in the later half of the 20^th century. It is relatively good in dietary fiber, vitamin C and beta-carotene. The sweet potato is also called a yam, but really isn’t one; in fact if you buy canned yams, they will have the notation, “sweet potatoes” if they are not actual yams. The sweet potato has been cultivated by man for about 5,000 years and is believed to have originated in South America and spread throughout the world from there. ....

Does anyone want Eggplant for dinner? Most would answer no, but not just no, but @#$@ NO, as the eggplant we are most familiar with is the purple overgrown garbage that our mothers bought from the store. Until last year, I was one of those who had never had an eggplant that wasn’t store bought and generally hated even the thought of eating one. Whenever my wife wanted to add a few eggplants to our garden, I found some reason to leave them out. Well, leave it to wives to find a way around a husband’s stubborn nature and while we were growing eggplant, my mother was. One day late last summer, we visited my mother and she had a pair of eggplants growing next to her walkway, (the squirrels eat anything not at least 20 feet from the nearest tree), and unbeknownst to me, my wife brought a couple of the purple monsters home. A few days later, dinner was a simple stir-fry and lo and behold there was a purple thing in my food. Well being the person I am, I was able to finish the dish before my mind registered the fact that I had eaten some of the foul tasting monstrosity, yet as I sat there I realized that it didn’t actually taste bad. So after some experimenting, I came to the conclusion that store bought eggplant is not the same as homegrown eggplant.....

Enjoy!