Pioneer Woman at Heart

  My 20 year old garden sign gave me a chuckle.  It is sort of how we felt after all that rain here.  The sign is broken, and it will be replaced.   Flower beds are weeded, rose bushes trimmed and flowers planted.  Whew!    The vegetable garden?  Not planted.  It is still, even with this heat here, way too wet.  I managed to weed out the rhubarb plants, but I think I carried about a pound of wet mud on my muck boots out of the garden.   We are still getting a few straggler asparagus.  The rain God's gave us a lot more chive blossoms, so I started another chive vinegar, and this one is with organic red wine vinegar.  It'll be great for summer salads and more.  I think we use red wine vinegar more often, but we now have both infused with chives (white wine and red wine vinegar). There really is no excuse to be so far behind, but I finally (yes, finally) got all the last 11 granny squares sewn on to my crochet ...

  Whoops.  I guess donating two books, instead of one, is a good thing too, ha ha!  I have been able to harvest chive blossoms, and it is rather early for that to happen.  You can read about how I did it HERE from last year.  We are only early on doing this by a few weeks, and all due to the rain this  year. While the chives are dehydrating, I picked more asparagus.  I will have to now replace my asparagus patch fence, and I will need to dig out a few wild raspberry plants the birds planted. What's new?  Well, I found a new houseplant to add to our home, and love it.  We have also planted a new apple tree, a new plum tree to replace the one that died, a new lilac bush, and one new hydrangea (also died over winter).  New landscaping edging was upgraded on one flower bed, and another is being worked on during dry days.   One volunteer cilantro plant, in the herb garden, survived the last frost.  One died.  One sage plan...

Just when I thought I would have zero blog content to post, my brain zero's in on something new to me.  Dehydrating chive blossoms is not new to me.  However, using them in a new way is new to us. Of course, you will need a somewhat larger patch of chives in your herb garden to be able to do this.  We allowed our chives to go to seed for several years.  Did you know that one chive blossom can contain up to 120 or so seeds?   Each of the tiny flowers in the chive blossoms can contain about 1-3 seeds each.   I have used fresh chive tops to infuse into oil in the past (leave chive tops to dry before infusing), but I have not made infused vinegar or used them for other dishes (have added them to baked egg breakfast dishes). Most salad dressings we make here, use red wine vinegar, and most recipes to infuse the chive blossoms into vinegar, call for white wine vinegar.   A new "first" time for us - I am making us an infused white wine vinegar. I w...

  What's on the breakfast plate?  An asparagus/dandelion/chive blossom frittata.  I just made it up as I cooked.  I would have had nettle, but it was raining at the time.