June: Garden stories and surgeries

First Summer Squash from my garden

next harvest, bigger than the first!!

Yep... June is a failure in being "Strict" Primal!!  Oh well... not beating myself up about that 'cause I'm staying the same weight-wise.  This is "PCS season" for the military... that means many people move from this base to another.  Therefore, there are a LOT of parties.  I hold my own at those.  Never eat desert, drink alcoholic beverages only once a week, and keep strict with no grains, beans/legumes or sweet stuff.  I have to admit that I did have one cheat... the pie portion of a lemon meringue pie!!  OMG it was SO good!!  Yeah, I got a headache from the sugar, but for my one huge cheat in the past 9 months?  I don't feel guilty at ALL!! 

June is also the month to start reaping the benefits of having started my zucchini, tomatoes and summer squash from seeds back in late April!!  I have many photos to share!

June was also the time for my teen to get his nose fixed... hopefully, along with the septum straightening out, so will his migraines.  We'll see... as you can see, he's not too impressed!!

Garden in frontyard: basil and Japanese Kabucha squash

Backyard garden

baby summer squash

baby tomatoes!

Zucchini flowers (and the Japanese beetle issue....)

The kabucha in the front yard was a silly moment I had... I was cutting one up for dinner and just took the handful of seeds and stuff and just put it out in the front empty plot!  Well, they grew and are continuing to grow!  They even have little flowers starting.  I also purchased a cute, small basil plant.  I don't have a clue what kind of basil as the tag was in Japanese, but I know that leaf... it's basil.  I'm hoping sweet basil, but I think it's just "normal" basil.


Backyard garden... no digging equipment and VERY dense grass made me resort to bags of dirt, place them and open bottom and top... Voila!  Small garden plots!!  I saw my dad do this a few years ago, but never thought I'd resort to this... well, when you want to do something, you'll figure it out!  This was my solution as the seeds grew faster than I thought they would inside!!  I had to get them into the ground quickly or the little plants would die...










Summer squash and zucchini have GOT to be my two favorite garden veggies... considering I've never tried to grow either, this is a fun experiment all the way around!!  You can tell by the eaten portions of the leaves that I'm doing this organically... no sprays or pesticides.  I figure, there will be plenty of veggies, I won't sweat the hungry insects...




I did have to go out and re-stake the tomato plants as they've become enormous and were falling over into the yard!!  My surprise was waiting underneath all that growth... small flowers and baby tomatoes!  YAY!! 



My saddest part so far is that, though the zucchini plants have a LOT of flowers, none have started to elongate into baby zucchinis.  I figured they would grow as quickly as the summer squash... since my FAVORITE way to cook them is together in a stir fry, I just assumed they'd grow at the same rate... heck, the plants did.  However, those daggone beetles REALLY like the zucchini flowers!! 




The first meal made with a summer squash was stir-fry with spring peas (pods) and onions.  The photo below is hubby's dish as for some reason I tend to give more attention to plating his food than my own... so, there's some nummy fried rice, too.  Yes, organic peas and pastured eggs went into that... local rice, too.  I figure if I'm going to make something, stick to the 'rules' of Primal, even if it's pushing the boundaries (like white rice). 

Salmon and green peppers, stir fry and fried rice.

So, the teen is doing better since the surgery (15th of June) and I'm trying to make him only Primal stuff... however, he's sneaky and gets at the packaged stuff in the pantry anyways.  I'm still hoping to reduce migraines by having him go gluten-free, but that's a personal decision he has yet to make himself.  It's difficult to be gluten-free in this world!!  But, NOT impossible... just one more step closer to him becoming Primal.