The salad that grew in my front yard, and a few other things...

To quote Tom Petty, "the waiting is the hardest part." It really is, isn't it. You see things growing and hanging on their plants but they are not ready to pick...and then all at once everything seems to ripen. Today was my first real haul from my teeny front yard garden. All of the ingredients for the above salad--except the dressing, which was simply virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar--were grown there adjacent to the sidewalk (pavements, to my friends across the pond). I ate it for dinner two minutes after picking, twenty feet from where it grew, and while it while it was still warm from the sun...tomato, sweet pepper, hot pepper, cucumber, basil, Italian Parsley, and sweet basil (fresh strawberries for dessert). The first tomato I picked, I did as I usually do each year, and ate it where it grew. Geeze o' man was this stuff good. This time of year is payoff time for a vegetable gardener. For me, growing food makes way more sense than a front lawn. I'm just sayin'...

Urban Simplicity.