The GoGo Girls take Toronto!

So totally not garden related, but I am super excited to be participating in the 2011 Mitsubishi City Chase in Toronto this Saturday, August 13th. 

http://www.mitsubishicitychase.com/en_site.asp

I have teamed up with my colleague Tina Baldwin and our official team name is "The GoGo Girls"!  And no this does not reference any risque type of dancing (get your minds out of the gutter) but rather that we both commute to Downtown Toronto every day on the GO Train from Burlington.  We have been readying ourselves by looking over maps, familiarizing ourselves with the TTC and talking about which challenges we are for sure avoiding (ie. sketching your partner in the nude).

We are super excited, not only to be participating in the race but also to raise money for a fantastic organization, Right to Play.  So if you have a moment and would like to support a great cause, please go to the following link and help support a great team (we are currently the #1 fundraising team and would love to stay in this position).

http://righttoplay.akaraisin.com/Toronto2CityChase/86d658ead6844aa9833d57b4094df49b

Z is for Zucchini

So we are finally at the point where we can harvest and eat some of the veggies in our garden.  This week my hubby noticed that some of the zucchini's looked ready to be picked and suggested we get out there before the dogs beat us to it.

This afternoon Liam, Ewan and I headed out to find the perfect zucchini so that we could make some yummy zucchini bread.  Not only did we find zucchini's but we also picked a jalapeno pepper, a cucumber and some cherry and yellow pear tomatoes.



What to do with the zucchini? Make zucchini bread of course! Liam and Ewan, my two little helpers were more than happy to help with this.

Here is the recipe we used.

Ingredients:

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 cups sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup water

2 cups grated zucchini

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar.  In a seperate bowl, combine oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice.  Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and chocolate chips and fold in.  Bake in 2 standard loaf pans, sprayed with nonstick spray, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. 

And the final product...Can't wait to try some tonight.



What exactly is this corn I am eating?!

So I popped into a locally owned fine food store, Wills & Co. this afternoon to pick up a few things and when I walked through the door an interesting sign caught my eye.  It made reference to local organic corn being in, and that it was not Monsanto.  What on earth is Monsanto I thought?!  And why isn't it good?  So after buying some of this organic, local, non Monsanto corn I headed home and googled what exactly Monsanto is.

So thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that Monsanto is an multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation and the leading producer of genetically modified seed.  What on earth does that mean?  So again, thanks to Wikipedia:

"Genetically modified foods (or GM foods) are foods derived from genetically modified organisms. Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA by genetic engineering techniques. These techniques are much more precise^[1] than mutagenesis (mutation breeding) where an organism is exposed to radiation or chemicals to create a non-specific but stable change. Other techniques by which humans modify food organisms include selective breeding; plant breeding, and animal breeding, and somaclonal variation."

Who knew?! I certainly didn't.  So does this mean that all the corn I have been buying in my regular grocery store is all genetically modified?  There doesn't really seem to be a clear answer to this.  In the process of my Internet search I did come across an interesting pamphlet produced by Greenpeace, "How to Avoid Genetically Engineered Food - A Greenpeace Shoppers Guide", http://gmoguide.greenpeace.ca/shoppers_guide.pdf
Turns out that a lot of the processed foods I purchase for my family on a regular basis contain genetically engineered ingredients.  Even baby formula is on the list!
Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying I will never purchase any of the products on the list, but it would be nice to know that these products contained genetically engineered ingredients.  Looks like I have a little reading to do to make myself and informed consumer.

So why am I posting this here, in a blog about my family's garden?  Well we did plant corn in our garden...I would like to think it is organic, non Monsanto corn...but who knows...guess I should have checked the plants I bought.

As promised...

Some pics of the garden.

 A wee little melon.

 Corn! And it looks edible...

 Cucumber thief?...pretty good chance I'd say!

 Zucchini bread anyone?

I'm a bad, bad blogger!

So when I started this I had really hoped that I would be writing every few days, and here it is over two months since my last post!  Okay - so I am recommitting, and feel free to call me out if I am AWOL again for more than a week. 

So how exactly is our garden growing? Great!  (will post some pics this weekend).  We have already sampled some of our cucumbers - super yummy, although not very asthetically pleasing, but no one seems to care when they are chopped up in a salad.  Our tomatoes are looking good, although I have yet to try one...the ripe one's have been going missing...I will need to do a little detective work, it is either one or both of our Labrador Retriever's or a couple of bunny friends who have been frequenting our yard.  The herb's are also doing well - we have sampled the parsley, basil, rosemary and chives - and it is so handy to just pop out to the backyard to get these instead of heading off to the grocery store.

I have to say my kids absolutely love "their" garden.  When we have guests, my almost 4 year old insists on taking them for a garden tour and one by one names every vegetable, fruit or herb that we are growing.   Every night we go out and water our garden and every couple of weeks we pull all the weeds out.  My two year old hasn't quite mastered this yet - we have had to replant a few things as he thinks everything in the garden is a weed!  He also thinks he should sample everything that is growing...green tomato anyone?! yuck.
I think my kids might just be starting to realize that they aren't going to find any sausages in the garden!

So hopefully I will have a pic of a nice ripe tomato this weekend or a fully grown cucumber or zucchini...fingers crossed that the dogs and bunnies don't beat me to it.

I think summer might just be on its way!

So it's been awhile, the weather has been awful!  Finally we have a great weekend to get some gardening started.

We decided we would be brave and build our planting boxes ourselves.  Armed with our copy of the All New Square Foot Gardening Book by Mel Bartholomew we headed off to the Home Depot. 

I normally cringe at the thought of bringing an almost 2 and 4 year old to the Home Depot, our trips usually end up with tears, tantrums and Mommy doing her best to at least appear to be a Mom who has it together.  I have to say the boys were great, an ice-cream bribe does wonders (note to self).

So lucky for us Cedar lumber was on sale this weekend - 50 % off - so our project ended up costing us half of what we thought it would.  We went with 12x6x2 boards and thankfully the store will cut them for you, so we ended up with enough lumber for 2 8x4 boxes.  We also purchased some inexpensive (.99 ea.) thin pieces of spruce to form our grid (see later pics) and some landscaping fabric.  A quick trip through the Garden Centre also yielded 2 broccoli plants, a flat of sweet corn and some cumcumber plants.

We had great intentions of getting the boxes built, filled with soil and then filled with our new plants - where did the day go?!  Well the boxes did get built, but once we determined how much soil we needed to fill them we realized that it would have to wait another day.

So the day was not a total bust and it gives us all time to ponder what vegetables are now going to fill these boxes and more time to convince Liam that we will not be planting sausages!

Just when I thought we had seen the last of the snow...

Surprise! It is back.  Yuck!  This past weekend gave me seriously false hope that spring was indeed on its way.  We even went so far as identifying where in our yard the veggie garden is going to be and did some online research on how to build raised bed planters. 

Costco.ca seems to have an interesting product, the Scenery Solutions Frame-it-All System Raised Garden Bed Kit (wow that's a mouthful!).  Now we just need to decide if we order two of the kits or bravely try to build something ourselves without spending more time/money than we would on the kits - all very confusing. 

I was also happy to discover during my online research that we are not going to have to dig up the ground, which for anyone who is familiar with Burlington knows, is solid clay, and an absolute nightmare to dig.  I found this great site that gives step-by-step instructions on how to build a "lasagna" garden, http://www.no-dig-vegetablegarden.com/, looks like we can avoid digging by layering cardboard, wet newspaper, hay and soil/manure - which is absolute music to my ears!

So the snow has delayed us a wee bit, but I am actually thankful that it provides me with a little extra time to decide exactly what we are going to do.

Starting to Plan...

So we are in the early stages here.  We really do have a blank canvas to work with - a huge back-yard with lots of possibilities.  I know that we want a large garden, but do we have a raised bed?  Any thoughts?  My oldest son Liam (3.5 years) has already told me he wants tomatoes, beans, carrots and...wait for it...sausages!  Despite my explanation that sausages do not grow in gardens he insists that we are going to be growing sausages this summer - all the more reason to have this garden.  I really just want a chance to show my boys how "real" food is grown.  This is going to give us all a chance to get dirty, have some fun and hopefully enjoy the fruits (or I guess in this case vegetables) of our labour all summer long.  Stay tuned...