Summer has arrived!

Today was a very satisfying day and a perfect indication of summer's arrival. In addition to being fabulously gorgeous weather in which to enjoy our day, we had our first meal that was composed primarily of food we grew in our yard (with a little help from the farmers market). Our lunch was so lovely that i couldn't help but take a picture.

We had a salad composed of spinach, mixed lettuce, baby swiss chard, and thyme from our garden. We also had yummy bruschetta with a farmers market tomato, green garlic, and the baby basil that i had to thin from the garden (it's oh so necessary, but so hard to do!). Adam took some of our neighbor's mint that is threatening to take over our side yard and made us some refreshing mojitos.

Carrots in the spring?

We'd heard that you could keep carrots in the ground all winter so we thought we'd try it, plus we had a really good carrot crop last year and couldn't possibly eat them all before winter.  We also bought a CSA storage share last year which gave us probably 15 additional pounds of carrots in December so we were busy eating those. We covered the carrots with a layer of fall leaves and left them. Turns out carrots winter wonderfully! I dug them up in March and got quite a bounty. There were a few bug holes at the tops of some carrots, but not a huge deal. I'm guessing I harvested at least 10 pounds.

Since we had so many carrots, i decided to make Adam's favorite cake: carrot cake. It turned out really well (don't tell Adam that carrot cake is pretty much foulproof and fairly easy!).

Kitchen Before and After

Well, it's been a long 2 months remodeling our kitchen. We had a couple sloppy contractors and changed our minds a couple times at the last minute, but for the most part it went really well. Thanks to our parents who helped us so much.

Here's what the kitchen looked like when we bought the house:

And here's what it looks like now:

We just have a few details to finish up before it's 100% finished.