garden madness

So Gregg has a couple of long stretches in his yard that aren't covered in grass, so for the last couple of years, we've been planting vegetables along the side of his yard. Last year, we started too late and never quite got the hang of watering regularly. This year, we planted so early that on some nights, he had to go out and cover everything to protect them from frost. And he got all into setting up a drip system all around the yard so that everything in his yard is watered automatically now. We even got excited and built another planter so that we could buy more plants. Well, G built it but I provided some moral support along the way. :) We ended up with zucchinni, tomatoes (3 types), eggplant, bell peppers (2-3 types), corn, basil (2 types), cilantro, mint, japanese cucumbers, chili peppers (a million different varieties, it seems). I don't know if we just got a little too excited or what, but we've been swimming in vegetables now for a couple of months. These pics are about a month old, so a lot of our plants are even bushier and bigger now. Except for the corn which seems be done now for the season and has been slowly wilting away.

Gregg does most of the tending - the weeding, fertilizing, spraying, that kind of stuff. And I've been trying to actually use everything. I like veggies, but its been hard keeping up. So if anyone has any good recipes out there that involve A LOT of vegetables, please pass them along. The winner so far was a night about a week or so ago when I made veggie paella (with just about very veggie we have) and gazpacho (which uses a lot of both tomatoes and cukes!). A couple of zucchini casseroles, a corn chowder, pickled cucumbers, lots of pasta primavera -- Its been fun trying out new recipes, but enough already. Especially if your recipe is easy and doesn't involve a ton of chopping, I'm be so ready to hear it!

And if you want any chili peppers, please come and take them. This is definitely a case where we went a little overboard. They sell a lot of peppers as six packs at the beginning of the season. And that's actually a lot of peppers, seeing as how one plant is more than enough to feed a family of 4 for the whole summer but we didn't know that. We started off with six packs of serranos and jalapenos. Happened to run into some Thai Chillis, Anaheims, then some Cayenne. We searched all over for Jabaneros and then even found these super hot Carribbeean peppers. Needless to say, our taste buds have been slowly withering away. Lately now we've taken to sauteeing a bunch of peppers in some oil, then blending it all up into a pure chili hot sauce that we've been throwing on everything. Fortunately for us, they seem to be staggered, the serranos will probably die off here in a bit just as the super hot ones like the Carribbean and Jabaneros are starting to ripen. But still, we have more heat than we can handle, so any help would be appreciated.