I love using fresh veggies in recipes, but buying them can get expensive! Growing your own can be green, frugal and fun, as well as a great learning experience for your kids!
Our backyard is finally fenced, so we don’t have to worry about deer gobbling up the fruits of our labor before we can, but our chickens were still a problem! The smart things would peck tomatoes, wait for bugs to swarm the broken tomatoes, then gobble their tasty bug treat!
We were able to keep the chickens out, but then my 3-year old son had a little too much fun playing farmer and picking things before they were ready. 😉 Next year we’re going to let each child have their own little plot of dirt to tend!
This year we tried lots of new things, and found some yummy new recipes. A new favorite is southern style greens (Swiss chard pictured.) The greens are eaten up by bugs a good bit, but we still get plenty, and it is far less expensive than buying fresh and/or organic greens. I put the greens in the crock pot with a few pieces of crumbled bacon, salt, pepper, crushed pepper flakes and garlic powder or fresh minced garlic. Even my kids ate these, until my daughter for some reason decided she no longer wanted to eat anything green!
We got this cute family of eggplants, and have enjoyed Eggplant Parmesan, as well as one of my favorite new recipes: Eggplant Zucchini Bolognese.
Good tomatoes are quite expensive at the grocery store, but we can grow our own, with no pesticides, for next to nothing!
Add in home-grown onions, garlic and basil and you have all my favorite flavors!
Easy tomato sauce freezes well, and makes amazing pasta or pizza sauce.
Essentially free, fresh, no pesticides and no coupons needed!
We also have some apple trees and my hubby is making some apple cider from our apples. I can’t wait to try it!
My husband is the main gardener right now since I have a little one who doesn’t nap unless I’m holding him! I’m hoping that by next year he will be able to play beside me so that I can do more of the gardening. In our previous home, we had city water, and I cringed every time my husband watered the garden, especially since it seemed to be in vain much of the time. We have well water here so we can water to our heart’s content, and it helps that we have mature trees on our lot so our garden doesn’t get baked by the sun all day long!
Do you garden? What do you like to grow? Has growing your own food encouraged your family to try new things?