While combing through a box in the garage a few months ago, I found a folder stuffed with torn out magazine pages and notes. It was my garden and home inspiration file from nearly a decade ago. As I paged through the pictures, it was fun to see how my style and tastes have evolved. Even though the file contained some ideas I still love, I ended up recycling it, because I feel overwhelmed by the amount of paper in my life. Bills, junk mail, tax notices, stacks of magazines. Ugh. When you’re a kid no one tell you that part of becoming an adult is being buried under a mountain of paper.

To keep track of ideas I love (like this amazing kitchen garden, which I will be doing a sneak peek of soon!), while minimizing paper accumulation, I recently started using Pinterest, which is a virtual pin board where you can file away inspiration from around the web. I use it as an online idea file for garden ideas, recipes to try, chicken coops, and more, plus as a tool for keeping tabs on trends. If you’re on Pinterest, let me know! I’d love to follow along and see what inspires you. Also, I started a pin board called Grow Cook Eat where I am filing away vegetable varieties I want to grow and DIY edible gardening projects. I’d love for this board to be collaborative, so if you want to pin ideas to it, just let me know and I will add you on as a contributor.

(2nd image via Lulabelle’s View)

Today I am so excited to announce that my book, Grow Cook Eat: A Food-Lover’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening, Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting & Storage Tips, is now on sale! Having the opportunity to write this book and work with the extraordinarily talented photographer, Jim Henkens, on all of the gorgeous photos was such a dream come true. I am so proud of this book and I feel very lucky that I get to send it out into the world.

To all of you who read this blog, thank you so much! Your questions and passion for good food inspired much of the content in this book, especially all the specific harvesting details. My goal was to write a gardening book that real life gardeners with busy lives would find useful and accessible, but also inspiring and seductive. Luckily, I landed at Sasquatch Books. The Sasquatch editing and design team was committed to helping make my vision for the book a reality and I really could not be any happier with how it turned out.

Grow Cook Eat is available at local bookstores, online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound and Powells, and at Anthropologie, West Elm, and Williams-Sonoma stores. The book will also be available at many wonderful small nurseries and gift shops and as an eBook. With the help of my crack project editor, Rachelle Longe, I’ve put together a little sneak peek inside Grow Cook Eat. The PDF includes the growing guide for basil and my Nona’s pesto recipe. I hope you enjoy it!

I have a ton of speaking engagements coming up this spring and I am looking forward to meeting a lot of other veggie gardeners. You can find the list over on my events page and on my book’s official Facebook page. I hope you’ll pop over there and like it. I’ll be updating the Facebook page regularly with event information. And in the meantime I will be over on Cloud Nine. I’ll probably be hanging out there for a few days but am looking forward to coming back to earth and planning this year’s garden.

When I stepped outside this morning to feed the hens, I found my arugula and broccoli rabe edged with a fine layer of frost. Frozen droplets of dew twinkled like crystals on the Brussels sprouts and the rumpled leaves of the ‘Lacinato’ kale reminded me of an etching. The whole backyard looked sparkly and bright as the sun began to peek through the fog.

As much as I love tomatoes and basil, I get the most satisfaction harvesting food from my winter garden. Last night I was too tired to cook, so I took a frozen pizza crust out of the freezer, rubbed olive oil over it and sprinkled on slivers of garlic and mozzarella cheese. I slipped the pizza into the oven and popped outside to harvest some arugula. When the cheese began to bubble on the pizza, I opened the oven door and scattered three big handfuls of arugula over the top of the pizza. I pulled it from the oven a few minutes later and felt victorious that I’d managed to make my makeshift dinner slightly more healthy.

The peas I planted at the end of summer surprised me by beginning to flower. What a treat to find a sweet little pea blossom in the garden in December! I’ve been harvesting the pea shoots for salads and am curious to see if the peas will grow like gangbusters in spring or fizzle out.

My purple Brussels sprouts are my favorite plant in the winter garden, even though to date the sprouts are only about the size of a pencil eraser. The plants are so gorgeous and I am apparently not the only one who appreciates them, as I have caught the very chubby squirrel who lives in our tree taking a drink from the rainwater that collects at the base of the big leaves.

My ‘Purple Peacock’ broccoli is just starting to form a head at the center of the plants. Once I cut it out, loads of side shoots will begin to form up and down the main stem. I love this variety because it produces pretty purple broccoli and the kale like leaves are delicious.

I read in the New York Times that Bo Muller-Moore, a folk artist who designed a tee-shirt that reads “Eat More Kale”, received a cease and desist letter from Chick-Fil-A. I’ve always found Chick-Fil-A’s advertising campaign featuring cows holding up signs that say “Eat mor chickin” to be pretty funny, but I am appalled that the company is threatening to take legal action against Mr. Muller-Moore. I really don’t think that people would confuse the two campaigns and, frankly, people who want to wear an “Eat More Kale” t-shirt probably don’t frequent Chick-Fil-A. Plus, kale is so beautiful, so delicious, and so nutritious that it is just plain silly to try and put a stop to someone who advocates eating more of it. Boo on Chick-Fil-A, I say.

I know this looks a lot like a weed, but mache is really a delicious salad green that is extremely cold tolerant. A little frost and even snow does not get this dainty green down. My mache is a bit small yet for salads, but it will burst into growth in late winter when the days being to lengthen again. A prospect that I am looking forward to!

One of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions is to make at least one dish with homegrown food from our garden. Near the end of summer, I planted purple Brussels sprouts in the hopes that they would be ready for Thanksgiving, but I got the seedlings into the ground a bit late and the sprouts are still teensy tiny. Oh well! We luckily have lots of greens and herbs to harvest for the meal.

I planted in arugula in late August and it is now the perfect size for a fresh salad. The leaves are about the size of my palm, very tender and peppery without being overpowering.

I am thinking about using the arugula as a base for a salad that is studded with candied hazelnuts, blue cheese and chunks of heirloom apple. But my mom doesn’t love blue cheese, and since she and my dad are our guests this year, I am also considering making a super simple salad of just arugula, shaved parmesan, toasted walnuts and a lemon vinaigrette.

Incredibly the ‘Rainbow Lacinato’ kale that I planted in March is still going strong eight months later. This is a seriously amazing variety. It just keeps growing and growing and growing! The tall stalks recently tipped over, but were nearly five feet tall before they fell. Jon is a vegetarian, so I always like to make a special main dish for him to enjoy along with all of the vegetable based side dishes. Rather than serve stir fried or braised kale, which we eat on a weekly basis, I am going to make a savory tart stuffed with with roasted vegetables, narrow ribbons of kale, and gruyere cheese.

It may have been a bad year for tomatoes, but it was a great summer for onions. We harvested tons of ‘Walla Walla Sweey’ onions in late summer and I set aside the biggest ones to use for Thanksgiving. They will find their way into our cornbread dressing, the tart mentioned above, and I’m sure other dishes as well.

In my Seattle garden I had a huge ‘Berggarten’ sage plant. I was very sorry to leave it when we moved because it was so beautiful and produced an endless supply of leaves that are perfect for cooking with. I planted a new ‘Berggarten’ sage in my Portland garden, but it is seriously unhappy in the spot I chose. The chickens dug it up on more than one occasion this summer and the soil doesn’t drain well. Even though the plant is pouting, there are still enough leaves to make Mark Bittman’s prosciutto wrapped sweet potatoes!

I am so excited to cook for Thanksgiving and share the meal with my parents and our good friends. I’m putting the finishing touches on the menu this week and am curious what will be on your table next week that comes from your garden?

Jon and I have been filming the 2nd season of Grow. Cook. Eat., our little garden to table video series on eHow.com. I thought I’d follow up yesterday’s post on harvesting pea shoots, with our video on pea shoot salad with shaved Pecorino Romano cheese. The salad is super simple to make, but so delicious! If you don’t have pea shoots, no worries. The vinaigrette works well with any salad green. I usually make some at the beginning of the week so I have it on hand when I want to make a quick salad for lunch or dinner.

The only major problem with the video is I say that the pea shoots have a “mild pea flavor”, which in retrospect does not sound particularly tasty!

I really love taking photographs and looking at photographs by other people. More than words, photos give you the chance to actually look at the world from someone else’s perspective, and cameras give you a chance to look at your regular life through a different lens. I have a fancy Nikon D90, but my most trusty camera is my iPhone. Not because it takes better pictures, but because I always have it with me. Lately I’ve found myself photographing the gorgeous apricot colored roses dangling over the sidewalk just down the block,  the alliums growing in abandoned lot nearby, and my sneaky chicken, Inky, whom I found looking for worms in an off limits area of the yard.

I just started sharing my photos on Instagram, a wonderful Twitter-like app for the iPhone. Instagram lets you easily share photos with friends and view photos of people from all over the world. It is really a lot of fun. I try and share at least one photo every day. If you’d like to get a little peek into my world, you can follow along on instagram. My handle is willigalloway. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still see my daily photo feed on Twitter, where I also post my pictures.

Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week…

This gorgeous rose is growing in a little strip of soil between the sidewalk and the street. The bush is nearly 8 feet tall and the roses cascade in an arch over the walkway. I snapped this picture in the late evening while I was on a walk with our dog, Domino.

My mom just got an iPhone and she texted me a picture of some flowers in her garden in Wyoming. It was a fun message to receive, and such a pretty picture that I decided to share it on Instagram.

We have a pink and yellow theme going on in the yard this summer. I got these super cool solar lanterns at IKEA for $14.99 a piece. During the day they soak up the rays (well, the weak light that makes its way through the clouds) and then they cast a rosy glow over the lawn and hammock in the evening when the sun goes down. I love looking out the window at night and seeing them bobbing in the breeze.

My English peas are setting pods right now (it’s about time!) and I cannot wait until they are ready and I can make my all-time favorite summer meal: pasta with garlic scape pesto!

I decided to spruce up our rusty bistro set with a little spray paint and chose “school bus yellow” as the color. Even though I have limited DIY skills, I was super pleased how the chairs and table turned out!

Domino and I like to explore the neighborhood and we spotted these alliums growing in an abandoned lot not far from our house. Whenever I see a garden in disarray I always wonder who loved that little spot of earth before and where they are now.

My garden is in one of its transition stages. The spinach and radishes I planted in March finally matured, so we ate them and then planted dill and bush beans in their place. Soon I’ll need to pull the lettuces before they bolt and sow something in the blank space left behind. I try to plant a little bit of food all throughout the summer—a technique known as succession planting—so that we’re never left with a bare patch of soil and nothing to harvest. Today over on Re-Nest I pulled together some ideas for what plants to put in your garden after you’ve pulled out spring crops (as in my cilantro is out, so I am putting basil in). But I’m curious, what are your favorite things to plant right now?

The favorite part of my garden this year is my patio salad garden. I bought a collection of wooden crates at an estate sale earlier this spring and turned them into planter boxes. I planted two up with lettuce seedlings, I direct sowed an Asian baby green mix in the third, and sowed peas to harvest for their shoots in another. I have two more crates that I’m planning on filling up with basil next week. Over on Re-Nest I wrote about how I turned the crates into planters.

The romaine lettuce variety ‘Breen’ is an absolute stunner in a container. Upright with black leaves that are kissed with chartreuse, it is such a welcome change from regular red or green lettuce. The heads are just starting to mature, so I am planning on making Caesar salad (the recipe for the dressing will be in my book!).

I got the idea to grow peas for their shoots from my friend Lorene. I sowed five rows of peas just one apart in this box. They have grown much faster than my peas in the ground, I think perhaps because the soil is warmer in the container. I planted them about 6 weeks ago and we’ve already harvested two big salads and the peas keep producing more shoots.

I sprinkled about 1/2 a packet of a mesclun mix over the soil in this container. It looked a bit bare for about two weeks, but then the seedlings popped up and filled the box in with a riot of color and texture. I’m so glad that I decided to direct sow seed in this container because these greens will be ready to harvest just as the lettuces that I planted as seedlings are finishing up.

This box produces lettuce like crazy. We just keep picking off the outer leaves and using them on sandwiches and in salads. Eventually I’ll harvest the whole heads and then replant. I just can’t decide what to put in next. Suggestions??

I always manage to kill at least one plant every year. On Saturday, a tomato fell victim. For the record, I was trying to help my ‘Stupice’ tomato grow faster in our frigid spring. So I placed a cloche over it. Then we had a fabulous, hot, sunny, summery day. The kind of day where you don’t need a sweater at night. The kind of day where all you want to do is eat ice cream and drink lemonade. The kind of day that would be awesome for a tomato, unless you happen to be the one sweltering inside a cloche. I’m guessing it topped 100 degrees underneath the little glass dome. It also appears that the sun literally fried the plant’s leaves, since they are as crispy as a chip. Happily, other plants in my garden are thriving…

‘Cherry Belle’ Radish

‘Breen’ Romaine

‘Romanesco’ Cauliflower

Our new house came with the perfect excuse for buying a hammock: a lovely old tree and a sturdy post situated near by. I chose a colorful striped hammock because it brightens up the dark corner (and it was only $15). I found some really cool pink and yellow solar Chinese lanterns at IKEA and we’re planning on hanging them like ornaments from the branches of the tree. Our little relaxation spot will be complete as soon as I find a little table to set pitchers of Arnold Palmers on.  I love working in my garden, but I have to say that admiring it from the hammock is pretty fun too.

I hope you all enjoy the weekend! I’ll be back next week with a tour of an awesome rooftop garden, advice for dealing with evil slugs, and photos of a super plant support system made from welded wire mesh.