Every year there is at least one spot in my kitchen garden that I am completely happy with. This summer I’m particularly pleased with the nasturtiums, ‘Lucia Lavender’ lobelia, and ‘Goldilocks’ bidens growing around the base of my round galvanized raised bed. Before the flowers filled in I felt that the wood chip path looked a bit stark, but the pretty jumble of flowers really softened up the edges and added a big pop of color.

The nasturtiums were supposed to have dark green almost purple-ish leaves, but they turned out to be green and white variegated. A happy accident! I’m hoping to save some seed and grow them again next year, because so far the aphids haven’t been interested in the mystery nasturtiums, which is a small miracle in my book.

Full disclosure: Proven Winners sent me the lobelia and bidens to try. I decided to share these pictures because I do really like the plants.

A few weeks ago my friend mentioned that she bought some water at the store that was flavored with mint, lavender, and lemongrass. It cost $2 for a tiny bottle. I told her to not even think about buying it again since we could make flavored water with herbs growing in my backyard for free.

Since then I’ve been experimenting with brewing herbal sun tea. It is ridiculously easy. Simply pick a great big handful of herbs, stuff them into a large jar, fill it with water, screw on a lid and set it in a sunny spot for a 4 to 6 hours. That’s it! The results are amazing. So far plain peppermint is my favorite, but lemon balm and lavender was quite tasty too. Here are a few other combinations I’m planning on trying:

Basil & Cucumber

Anise Hyssop & Fennel Fronds

Chocolate Mint & Orange Slices

Spearmint & Chamomile

Plain Pineapple Sage

Rosemary & Lemon Slices

Lemon Verbena & Anise Hyssop (or Fennel Fronds)

Rose Geranium & Chocolate Mint

Making this tea is so much fun. The combinations are pretty much endless and it is a great way to utilize herbs, especially the more unusual ones, like the fruit sages and scented geraniums. We have a Penguin (a kitchen gadget that makes carbonated water out of tap water), and I’m thinking about making some sparkling flavored waters for an upcoming car trip. I love the idea of taking a bit of my garden on the road!

Sometimes I’ll notice a small element in my garden that stops me in my tracks. Like these water droplets clinging to the rumpled surface of my savoy cabbage. It’s details like this that makes gardening so addictive. You never know when you might run across a perfect spiderweb suspended between tomato cages or a hummingbird darting in and out of the pineapple sage.

When I planted this little cabbage in the corner of a raised bed it looked small and lonely, but as it grew it filled in the space beautifully. I hesitate to harvest the head now, not because I am unsure how I want to prepare it, but because it is one  of my favorite stops on my daily garden tour. Silly, I know. But I’ll kind of miss it when it is gone.

This summer Kelly from the wonderful blog Make. Grow. Gather. has decided to take back summer. She’s been posting lists of summer must-haves (think build a sand castle and go night swimming), fabulous summer recipes (burrata mozzarella, roasted sungolds and basil oil, anyone?), drool-worthy giveaways (a hammock!!), and crafts. Kelly kindly asked me to put together a Lazy Summer craft project.

I was a little nervous, because Kelly has serious craft chops—she writes a crafting column for the Washington Post. But I love summer, especially lazy summers, so I decided to take a crack at transforming a wine crate into a basil box. You can see the entire step-by-step project and get more ideas for making the most of summer over on Make. Grow. Gather. My favorite project so far? Kelly’s tomato cage lantern!

My ‘Mammoth’ dill just began to bloom and the ‘National Pickling’ cucumbers are setting fruit. Pickles are clearly in my future. Happy Monday!

Today is Bastille Day in France, but at our house it is also my 30th birthday! Everyone keeps asking me if I’m anxious about turning 30, and you know what? I’m not. When I spotted these signs on an ice cream shack a few weeks ago I had to take a picture because they sum up my personal philosophy pretty well, and that is:  Life is for gobbling up! I’m planning on continuing to enjoy every sweet, drippy, gooey bit.

My first sunflower bloomed just in time for the West Seattle Garden Tour this Sunday, July 18. While my garden isn’t featured on the tour, I will be giving a talk on creating a beautiful and productive kitchen garden at 12:00. My lecture is full of pictures and I’m planning on covering a lot of do-able strategies for growing more food in a regular city lot, including vertical gardening, succession planting, and integrating ornamentals and edibles.

The best part about my lecture? It is being held at South Seattle Community College, which is home to one of Seattle’s best kept gardening secrets—a lovely arboretum! The self-guided tour features a wine tasting and eight fantastic residential gardens, including my friend and neighbor Mari Malcolm’s absolutely amazing retreat. When you enter her garden it is like stepping into another world!

Tickets and maps for the tour are available at Swanson’s Nursery, Wells-Medina Nursery, and West Seattle nursery, as well as a number of small businesses in and around West Seattle. I hope you’ll consider joining me on Sunday!

Update! My original post had a typo. My talk is at noon (not 1:00 as originally stated). I apologize for any confusion!

I spotted this great print at the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese launch party for their new Toma cheese. I couldn’t agree more!

English peas rank right up there with tomatoes and strawberries on my list of favorite things to grow. One of my very earliest memories is standing in my mom’s garden between two rows of peas that were taller than me. She taught me how to unzip the pod and pop the sweet peas right into my mouth—something I still love to do.

My current obsession is to toss English peas with pasta and garlic scape pesto. In this dish you don’t even have to cook the peas. You just shell them directly into a colander and pour the boiling pasta water over them. The heat from the water and the pasta cooks the peas just a bit. It is so crazy good. I’ve had it three times in the past week.

Now that it is finally hot, I am going to harvest the remainder of our peas and pull out their vines. I’m thinking about making fresh pea hummus crostini with pea tendril garnish, but I’m open to other ideas!

My friend Leigh has a theory that newborn puppies are cuter than newborn babies. I tend to agree, though I’m not sure if her theory would hold true with ladybug larvae. They look kind of like miniature orange and black alligators. The adults are much more attractive. That said, we have dozens and dozens of ladybug larvae all over our aphid infested hops and I couldn’t be happier about it. They can apparently eat more than 300 aphids a day. That is quite the appetite. I’ve probably spent at least an hour observing them this week. They are fascinating and their strange little bodies have been growing on me, especially since the aphid population is in decline!

In the Garden

I bought some fish fertilizer and seaweed extract so that I can give all of my plants a dose of nutrients before the heat wave hits next week. I transplanted some baby lettuces into bare spots in the garden and began plotting where to sow more bush beans. Edible weeds, including purslane and lambs quarters, germinated in one of my beds. I’m, gasp, going to let them get a little bit bigger and then harvest them for salad.

In the Kitchen

Bob, my neighbor, kindly helped me harvest an entire freezer bag of raspberries from his large and mature patch (I think he saw me staring at the berries wistfully through the fence and felt bad for me). In exchange I gave him some fresh eggs from our girls. I’m planning on making a buttermilk raspberry cake for the 4th, using both our eggs and his berries.

Good Reads and Finds

I often re-read books (weird, I know). This weekend I’m considering reading The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys again. It is a stunning story (though sad) and small enough to be consumed in one sitting.

We have a beautiful patch of Berggarten sage in our garden. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a sage themed cocktail hour and serve vodka sage suckers and tempura sage leaves?

Tin cans make the sweetest casual vases and flower pots. I especially like this arrangement from Sweet Paul (though I would skip adding gravel to the bottom of the cans).

Ruffled, tender, sweet. Fun to dress up. Lettuce is kind of the baby doll of the garden.

Our beds are dotted with heads of frilly leaf lettuces, upright romaines, an heirloom iceberg, and delicate butterheads. I prefer to grow full heads, rather than baby greens, because they look pretty planted in patterns and their mature leaves offer the best of both worlds: a satisfying crunchy base and tender tops.

Lettuce comes in an astounding variety (‘Tom Thumb’, a single serving-sized butterhead, is pictured above). Here’s a round up of my favorites.

‘Forellenschluss’ (also known as ‘Flashy Troutback’) is my absolute favorite lettuce variety. This heirloom has pretty red speckled green leaves and holds up well in heat. One large head easily makes a salad that can serve four and the leaves have a very mild flavor. Planted next to the ‘Forellenschluss’ is a red leaf lettuce that self-sowed in my garden. I’m not sure what the variety is, but if I had to guess I’d say ‘Outredgeous’ or ‘Merlot’ (Just a note on ‘Merlot’. It’s a popular heat-tolerant variety and very pretty, but I think it tastes bad).

The hardware store by my house was selling flats of sweet alyssum for $6 earlier this spring, so I bought a couple and planted it as a border in several of my beds. The little flowers lure in a lot of pollinators and beneficial insects and set off my green and red romaine lettuces nicely.

I discovered this green and red leaf lettuce growing in my path earlier this spring. It apparently self-sowed from the winter salad mix I grew last fall. I have no idea what the variety is, but I love leaf lettuces for their pretty open growth habit. I often pop out and harvest just a few leaves and stuff them into sandwiches at lunchtime.

For those of you who have been following my great iceberg lettuce experiment, I’m happy to report that nice big heads are forming. Hurrah! Despite its name, iceberg lettuce is supposed to handle heat with aplomb. So I’m going to give this head at least another week before I harvest it.

This speckled lettuce looks a lot like ‘Forellenschluss’, but it is a French butterhead variety called ‘Anuenue’. It’s just lovely!