Warning: This post is filled with cute pictures of pets in gardens. Read it at your own risk. The cuteness can be overwhelming!

A few weeks ago I asked you guys to send in cute snapshots of your pets in the garden and my inbox was filled with adorable snapshots. I’ve collected all of the photos together here for you to enjoy. Thanks to everyone who shared photos of their pets and their stories!

Wink the Adorable and Frida the Glamorous

LeAnn, who writes the fabulous blog Lelo in Nopo, shared photos of Wink the Dog (see top of post) and Frida the Cat. Like so many of us she can’t imagine her garden without her pets, but it has also become a special place for Wink, who sadly just lost her eyesight. LeAnn reports that Wink is learning to cope with her new life and that the garden has been a place of healing.

Jimi on the Prowl

I just love orange boy kitties, so I was super excited when Danielle from One Green Tomato sent in this photo of her late cat, Jimi, prowling in the corn. Such a wonderful shot and a great way to remember him!

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Gardening in the gutter, literally, is one of the hottest small space gardening trends I’ve spotted this year. The idea behind a gutter garden is simple: hang rain gutters from a wall, fence, or chains, fill them up with potting soil, and plant shallow-rooted crops in the trough-like containers. This arrangement is ingenious on a number of levels.

a. It allows you to turn otherwise unusable sunny areas into growing space.

b. Rain gutters are inexpensive, readily available, and come in a range of edible garden-friendly materials, including copper, plastic, and aluminum.

c. Some of the best kitchen garden crops grow well in shallow containers, including lettuce, spinach, mache, herbs, and strawberries. Scallions, radishes, beets, and round carrots like ‘Parmex’ can also be grown in gutter gardens.

d. The gutters are hung up off the ground, which helps protect crops from rabbits, groundhogs, and other garden creatures that like to nibble on salad greens.

e. The gardens can be positioned at a height that makes them accessible to all people.

Here’s a quick round up of some gutter garden ideas:

Alaska gardener  Suzanne Forsling first wrote about her three-tiered gutter garden last year and it remains one of the most popular examples around.

Life on the Balcony has an excellent tutorial from landscape architect Janet Luke on creating a balcony gutter garden. I love this project because it allows condo and apartment gardeners to grow a lot of food in a small space and it creates a living screen. Using copper gutters would makes this system particularly attractive.

The most ingenious gutter garden I’ve come across is located at the Highland People’s Food Seedbank Project in Inverness, Scotland. This garden was designed by Chris Scatchard and it has an integrated irrigation system. I think this design would work really well in school, office, community, and condominium gardens.

Gutters can also be incorporated into traditional landscapes. I’m especially fond of the gutter in Becky Barsch Fischer’s vegetable garden in Texas because it takes advantage of the vertical space above a raised bed (see the top photo).

I’m writing a book!

I’ve been waiting almost my whole life to say that sentence. I’ve always wanted to write a book. When I was a kid I typed stories on my mom’s super awesome word processor machine. I majored in English in college. And I’ve daydreamed for years about writing a book about vegetable gardening. A book that is beautiful, and useful, and fun to read. And now I’m doing it!

“The Book” (as it is referred to in out house) is being published by Sasquatch Books and it is tentatively titled Grow. Cook. Eat: A Food Lover’s Guide to Kitchen Gardening. The basic idea behind the book is this: as a gardener you have access to really amazing, gourmet-quality food. Think heirloom tomatoes, purple tomatillos, garlic scapes, green coriander seed, radish tops, tender baby green beans, and squash blossoms. My goal is to help readers explore the diversity of food in their gardens, discover when and what to harvest, and use that food in the kitchen. So, the book is organized into individual guides for 50 vegetables, herbs, and small fruit and it has very specific growing, harvesting, and storage advice, plus each guide has a recipe and cooking tips.

Like all good things, this book is a collaboration and I am lucky enough to be working with a wonderful editor, Susan Roxborough, and the very talented photographer, Jim Henkens. Jim and I have been hard at work photographing the book this summer and I can tell you one thing: it is going to be gorgeous. Last week we shot photos for the cover and it was so fun. My friend Rachel, who is a talented stylist and owns Finch & Thistle Event Design, came to the shoot and helped everything just look lovely. Plus, she told jokes so I smiled for the camera (you can check out her behind the scenes shots here).

The book will be published in January 2012, which seems like a long way off, but I’m sure it will be here before we know it!

Tomatoes straight off the vine are undeniably good, but tomatoes slowly roasted with olive oil, herbs, and salt are crazy good. I can eat an entire pan of them by myself in one sitting. They are that delicious.

The goal of slow roasting tomatoes is to concentrate the natural sweetness of the fruit, without drying them out. I roast mine at 225 degrees F until they have shrunk in size by at least a third (usually about 5 hours) and are wrinkled, soft as a pillow, and have a jam-like consistency. Paste tomatoes like ‘Principe Borghese’, ‘Striped Roman’ and ‘Amish Paste’ and salad tomatoes like ‘Jaune Flamme’ and ‘Stupice’ work best for roasting because they are small and have relatively dry flesh. You can roast cherry tomatoes, but they do better at higher temperatures because they are so juicy. I usually slice them in half, toss them in olive oil, and roast them at 425 degrees F for about 10 minutes and then pour them over pasta. Big, beefy tomatoes like ‘Brandywine’ and ‘Japanese Black Trifle’ are better served raw. I’ve only harvested three ripe tomatoes so far this year, and they were all sungolds (I know, pathetic!). So I’ve been buying tomatoes at the farmers market while I wait, fingers crossed, for the rest of my very green tomatoes to ripen.

Slow Roasted Tomatoes

Slow roasted tomatoes are incredibly versatile, you can include them in a mezze platter, toss them with pasta, cut them into chunks and add them to whole grain salads, layer them on sandwiches, place them on top of toast, and eat them straight off the pan. I also like to toss them with a clove of chopped garlic that has been softened in warm olive oil and a couple tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and let them marinate in a shallow dish for a few hours. They also freeze really well and are such a treat in the winter.

Just keep in mind that they are called slow roasted tomatoes and they can take 6 hours or longer to reduce, so plan your timing accordingly.

Ingredients:

Tomatoes (about 15 ‘Jaune Flamme’, which are slightly larger than a ping pong ball, will fill a regular rimmed baking sheet)

Olive oil

Sea salt

Freshly ground pepper

2 teaspoons fresh thyme, minced (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 225 degrees F.

Wash the tomatoes and slice them in half lengthwise (from stem end to the bottom). Arrange the tomatoes in rows on a rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil (about 3 tablespoons) over the tops of the tomatoes. With your hands, rub the olive oil all over the tomatoes, making sure they are completely coated. You don’t want to leave any spots bare, as they will dry out and get crispy in the oven. Sprinkle salt and the thyme (if using) over the tomatoes, plus a good grind of pepper.

Slide the tray into the oven and let the tomatoes slowly reduce. Check on them about once an hour, if they start to dry out, drizzle on a little more olive oil. Pull them from the oven when they are very soft, wrinkled around the edges, and have a jam-like consistency in the middle. The timing will depend on the size and juiciness of the tomatoes, but it usually takes between 4 and 6 hours.

When I was a kid we had this book called Be Nice To Spiders. I always think of it at this time of year because big tan and brown spiders spin their webs all over our garden. We find them in the tomato plants, strung across pathways and on the chicken coop. We spotted this web on our deck near the hop vine. It looked lovely in the evening sunlight, so I decided to take a picture. Right after I snapped this shot the spider sprung up and snagged a fly. She spun the fly into a mummy and then crawled back down into place. I guess she plans on saving her dinner for later!

Today’s post comes from the files of too cute to handle. This weekend while I was cooking dinner our dog, Domino, was bugging me to play. I told him to go outside and get his favorite toy, a squeaky stuffed bumblebee. Apparently he couldn’t find the bee, but he decided that this overripe cucumber was even better. He ran up on to the porch with it, very proud of his discovery. He then proceeded to run around with the cucumber in fast circles in the yard and then plop down and gnaw on it.

Animals are an integral  (if sometimes frustrating) addition to my garden and Domino’s antics made me think it would be fun to do a whole post on pets in the garden. So if you have a cute shot of your dog, or kitty, or bunny, or chicken, or goldfish in the garden, send it to me at info@digginfood.com by Friday!