Here’s the latest update from Kalyn’s garden, which is completely full of weeds, since I’ve been seriously distracted by having two young visitors. Let me just say that I have new-found respect for any mother with young kids who writes a food blog! We had lots of fun, and they’re incredibly good kids, but now I’m trying to catch up on the blog, cooking, and weeding the garden!

You can click Garden Updates to see all my posts about gardening. (As always, links to commercial sites are merely to provide information about that type of plant, and not an endorsement of the site.)

The exciting news this week is that my four purchased basil plants were so big I did a serious trimming and ended up with 11 small containers of chopped basil in olive oil to go in the freezer. Each of these containers has about 4-5 tablespoons of chopped basil, so that’s a lot of basil! I’ll use this all winter to replace fresh basil in things like Italian Sausage and Zucchini Soup. If you have basil in your garden here’s how to freeze fresh basil.

These are the basil plants I started from seed, which are already getting big enough to start using the basil. I now have a nice patch of basil by my back door, which is a wonderful thing!

Hooray! The first Brandywine tomatoes have finally appeared. The two plants I purchased have multiple clusters of tomatoes like this. Brandywines are famous for having bumpy “shoulders” on the tomatoes. The volunteer Brandywines don’t have any tomatoes on them yet, but they have lots of blossoms.

Finally my first red tomato, a tiny cherry tomato. I might have taken a better photo, but I’d already eaten the tomato by the time I realized it was so out-of-focus.

I planted eggplant as kind of an afterthought, and I wasn’t sure if they were getting enough sun in the corner of my garden. Something is eating the leaves, but some eggplant flowers have appeared, so possibly I’ll have eggplant to grill.

The wonderful 8-Ball Zucchinis continue to be good producers. I have lots of good recipes for zucchini, but so far this summer my favorite is the new recipe for Cheesy Zucchini with Garlic and Parsley.

Finally some tiny yellow squash have appeared. I love to make “Creamed” Zucchini with a mixture of yellow squash and zucchini, so I’m hoping to have yellow squash soon. 

The Really Big Squash are getting really big! The plant is spreading out a lot too, and I’m not sure how well it’s going to co-exist with the volunteer Brandywines.

This is my Silver Thyme plant with tiny purple flowers on it, which shows why some people use thyme as an ornamental plant as well as an herb.

Finally, I rarely show my flowers since this is a food blog, but this Bee Balm is one of my very favorite flowers. This one is in my front yard, with some yarrow peeking out behind it.

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