Harvesting Flowers & Veggies | A Peaceful Summer Day of Arranging + Cooking

Good morning friends. I hope you are all doing well. It's a sunny but cool day and I intend to make the most of it. In fact, I have a laundry list of fun kitchen and garden projects that we can tackle today. Among other things, I want to pinch back my basil plants and then use the clipped leaves to make pesto that we can enjoy with tonight's dinner, which is pasta with pesto and white beans. So please grab yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and come spend the day with me. Now before we head outside, I want to fix myself a mid-morning snack. Cottage cheese. This is the kind that contains good cultures. I think a half cup of this contains 14 grams of protein. To sweeten this up and make it a little more palatable, I'm going to add some of the awesome strawberry jam that you and I made together in the last episode. And if you missed that episode, I hope you will go back and watch it. We had great fun making the jam and canning it, and that was a job. Cottage cheese and jam, the mid-morning snack of champions. Now I want to show you these carrot seeds that I bought. I have planted carrot seeds twice in the little herb garden, and both have mostly been failures. And then a friend of mine told me that his wife bought some carrot seeds from Burpee, and they are arranged on tape. So they're already spaced. So it's called seed tape. Let's have a look. Oh, this is really cool. Look at that. So this is a total of 7.5 feet of tape, and there are 83 seeds per tape. So we are going to bring this outside and plant it. While I prepare the soil here, I wanted to mention that several viewers have asked me whether or not I have critters that come into my gardens. And in truth, my food gardens are fenced in, so I get very few critters in the food gardens. The rest of the property is not fenced. And yes, I do have all kinds of visitors because my property borders the woods. As a matter of fact, I had a very special visitor here last night. Let me show you that clip. I will be very happy to never see another black bear on this property. That was kind of frightening. In the comments below, let me know what wildlife visits your garden. Yeah, this is so clever. It has perforations here, so you can cut the tape any length you want. So I planted 250 pelleted carrot seeds here in spring, and only about five of them germinated. I don't know, maybe my dog dug them up. I don't know. But after that, I planted about a hundred just regular carrot seeds, and almost none of those germinated. So I think maybe birds are coming in here and picking out the seeds. This is my third and final attempt at carrots. Now all I have to do is cover the tape lightly. I really love how the seeds are already spaced out. That way, I don't have to thin the carrots. I have plenty of carrot tape left, so I could do a succession planting sometime in the future. Now let's get these watered in. Next on my list, I want to pot up this cute calibrachoa. I intentionally left the plant in its pot, and I will show you why. After I packed the soil around the pot, I now have the perfect opening for the root system, so I don't have to disturb the roots. There you are. You are very pretty, and I hope you will grow very well in my garden. Let's put you right here. What's next on my list? I always like to have a list. Harvest royal purple radishes, plant more radish seeds, plant cilantro seeds, and harvest tops from basil. Let's go. Look at this. Beautiful. This one's even prettier. Still a baby. This is the cherry bell radish. So now we can plant more royal purple seeds. Radishes are great because they only need 28 days to mature, so they go from seed to harvest in less than a month. As soon as I remove these weeds, I can plant some cilantro seeds. I'd love to use cilantro in sauces and more. It's an herb I used to hate when I was younger, but as I got older, I fell in love with it, and it's a great garnish. Of course, for all Mexican dishes, I mean, it's a must-have for Mexican dishes. And just like that, the cilantro is planted. This is the ivy geranium that you and I bought together from a local nursery, and I need to deadhead the spent flowers so that it will continue to bloom. And look at all of the new clusters of flowers that are coming. Lots and lots of them. And that's because I continuously deadhead the spent flowers. Off with its head. To accompany tonight's dinner, I'm going to harvest some of my lettuce greens. This is my favorite. It's butter crunch, also known as Boston lettuce, with some romaine, oak leaf lettuce. Then I want to pinch back my basil because I want the basil to grow very bushy, and also my goal is to have all leaves and no flowers on the basil. So you can see where I pinched it back before, it sprouted one, two, three, it sprouted four new stems. How would you like to be turned into pesto? I think I've done everything I set out to do here in the herb garden, so let's go into the kitchen and get everything washed up to the refrigerator. For lunch today, I'm going to enjoy a radish sandwich. It's nothing more than radish slices and butter on good bread. So the royal purple radish will be for my lunch sandwich, and the cherry bell radish will be for my salad tonight. First time I tasted a radish sandwich was in Paris, France, and I thought, what a weird thing, but it was unbelievably wonderful, and I've been enjoying radish sandwiches ever since. Will you have a radish sandwich too, Lisette? Oh yes, please. Good, because I have more than enough radishes, and the sandwich that I enjoyed in France was on a baguette, so that's what I am using here. I think today we will have open-face radish sandwiches. In my opinion, you cannot have too much butter on a radish sandwich. A little flaky salt. I don't know how something so simple can be so profoundly delicious. So Lisette, what do you think? I think this is super yummy. I love the combination of the radish with the butter and the salt. Oh, so glad. I need to water these Boston ferns, and then we're going to go up to the kitchen garden, because I have a couple of jobs I need to tackle there. Before we head up to the kitchen garden, I want to show you this deutzia. I think it's called deutzia scabra. I did not plant this shrub. I think it was probably the third owner of this 200-year-old house. Deutzia is a perennial shrub. It blooms every June. We're going to take the scenic route to the upper, or kitchen garden, because there are some roses in the boxwood garden I'd like you to see. And this clematis has climbed up and is just getting ready to bloom. These San Marzanos that you and I planted together are growing with gusto right now. So I need to regularly tie them to this cattle panel trellis, and eventually they will grow up and over the trellis arch. And they are already flowering. That's a good sign. Some years I prune these San Marzanos to just one stem, but this year I'm letting them do whatever comes naturally to them. Next, I'm giving some of my onions a haircut. According to multiple sources, pruning this way encourages larger bulb growth. I will wash the tops I've cut and then add them to tonight's salad. My sweet peas need some training too. They're falling on the floor. They're supposed to grow up. Here are the leeks that you and I planted together, lovage, garlic. Now this is garlic that I bought from Michigan, or M.I. Gardner, and it was supposed to be hardnet garlic, but it's not making the usual garlic scapes that hardnet garlic makes at this time of the year. Instead it's making flowers, and I think once the garlic creates a flower, the garlic stops growing. So I'm not sure why I have flowers instead of scapes. And here are potatoes growing in an onion patch. They're potatoes that I probably should have ripped out quite some time ago, but I forgot to. And at this point I'm going to let them just produce potatoes. And the official potato bed is over there. My greatest joy in this garden right now are these snapdragons. You and I planted these together from seed two winters ago, and they survived last winter, and they came back. So I am delighted to have them, and I'm going to cut some of these stems, and then we can make a snapdragon arrangement. Just look at the flowers on this snapdragon. I can't remember if this is Madame Butterfly or one of the Potomac varieties. I think this will make a gorgeous flower arrangement. Since I need nitrogen for this compost bed, I'm going to go ahead and strip off the lower leaves from my snapdragons. That will be one last job that I have to do in the house. Hopefully we won't encounter a black bear on our way back to the house. This is the first time in months that I have not had to go to the flower shop in order to make a flower arrangement. And this is an asparagus stem that turned itself into a fern because I never harvested the stem in time to eat it. And this can be a part of our flower arrangement. I also clipped some boxwood. Three cheers to the very first garden arrangement of the season. And I think ultimately I will place this in the music room, but for now we can enjoy it right here. I'm going to get cleaned up here, and then I need to run to the gym, have a short workout, and I need to practice piano. And when I come back, we can get started on dinner. So I don't know which was worse, the gym workout or the piano practice session. Actually, the piano practice session was fun. The gym workout was necessary. So tonight's dinner, and by the way, I am starving, is penne rigata with basil pesto and white beans. And I have the pesto, I mean the basil leaves that we clipped earlier, plus I had some other leaves on hand. I'm going to make just enough of this dish for tonight's dinner because I'm here by myself and for tomorrow's lunch. Basil, I need almonds, a lot of almonds. Give these a little spin. I need some lemon. I don't have a fresh lemon on hand, so I'm using very good pure lemon juice from a bottle. There's no recipe for tonight's dinner, but believe me, if you've tried this at home, you cannot mess it up. The ingredients are just wonderful. Oh, smells fabulous. I forgot the garlic. It'll smell even better after I add the garlic. This is garlic paste. And I want just a pinch of salt. Give this a quick taste. Oh, this is heavenly. As I said, you cannot go wrong with these ingredients. And I will be adding grated parmesan cheese a little later. I have a big pot of water that has come to a boil behind me, and I need to salt the water. And I will cook the pasta just to the al dente stage. Now I can add some white beans. These were from a can, and I did drain and rinse the beans. Plus I want to add my, before I add the pesto, I want to add the cheese. Add the pesto. The last time I made this pasta dish, my spouse and I fought over who was going to get the leftovers. That's how delicious it is. To transfer this to a pot here, a little baking dish. You could certainly keep this pasta dish warm in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven for a good 30 minutes before serving it. So it's a dish that you can make ahead of time. I thought I was making enough for just tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch, but it looks like I made enough for an army. Maybe we'll top it off with a little extra parmesan cheese. One little taste. This, my friends, is an explosion of flavor. I love that basil. The white beans contribute texture to the pasta, and of course the cheese lends a creaminess. It's just fantastic. And the pesto is so fresh. I'm going to enjoy this dinner and probably a glass of white wine, either in the herb garden or out on the porch. I just want to thank you for being here with me today as we tackle some odds and ends outdoors and in. Also, I want to thank you so much for following me on YouTube. Because of you, I'm able to do the things I love to do. In the next episode, we're going to make cocktail appetizers, and I think that will be a fun video. And until then, please treat yourself very, very well, and I can't wait to see you next time. Bye for now, friends. Cutting outside.