Independence Days Challenge: garden in pots

Lavender, ready to be harvested and dried.

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
The kids and I planted a garden-in-pots on top of our second driveway, in one of the only tiny bits of frequent sunniness we have. I didn't have nearly enough pots for all the seeds we wanted to plant (our planned-for guerrila-gardening raised bed has been abandoned for now, as the location proved to be much shadier than we'd remembered.) But we made do with what we had, and are trying Kentucky Wonder beans, Moonglow tomatoes, Blondkopfchen tomatoes, Straight Eight cucumbers, Double Yield cucumbers, German chamomile, and Boston Yarrow squash (all of these go toward the Growing Challenge). It rained most of the week, and the beans and chamomile are already sprouting.

Chamomile sprouting. Teensy tiny seeds plus toddler hands equals very crowded seedlings!

2. Harvest something:
Eggs. Foraged elder flowers.

The herb garden, picked over by children and chickens (notice the nearly-leafless comfrey--you can tell how tall the chickens are by how high its stalk is bare).

3. Preserve something:
Froze 2 qts spinach. Drying elder flowers.

Our first tomatoes appeared this week.

5. Preparation and storage:
Added several jars of peanut butter and coconut oil to the basement, trying to restore our depleted supplies.

My potted Meyer lemon tree has doubled in size with all this rain.

7. Eat the food:
I finally made kale chips (well, I've made them in the past, but I finally made them without burning them...) and the kids loved them. Sure to become a regular lunch item. I used up some of our many frozen-last-year red peppers to make a roasted red pepper sauce for spaghetti. The kids and I ate bread with radish butter and salt (yummy for those of us who dared try it. Gotta do the 10-times-more thing for a few of them...). We're eating lots of greens, of course: salad, swiss chard, bok choy and (new at the market this week)--broccoli!