5 Things You Can Eat from the Garden Every Day Even If You're Not a Homesteader

Here are five foods you can eat every single day from the garden, even if you're not a homesteader. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. My name is Nicole Burke and I'm not a homesteader. I am a kitchen gardener. I'm a mom of four, a business owner, and I use that four letter word quite often. B, U, S, Y. You know what I'm talking about. Busy. Well, if you're busy and you're still trying to figure out, okay, could I have a garden and would I actually have anything I could eat from it, the answer is yes. And I'm going to give you five things you could eat from your garden each and every day, even if you're busy, even if you're not a homesteader, even if you've got just a small space for the garden. Number one is tea, specifically mint tea. Chamomile tea, Anise hyssop tea, Lemon balm tea. Herbal teas are super easy to provide for yourself year round, no matter how much space you have or how much time you have. These herbs grow for so much of the year. They're not picky, they're so easy to grow. You can grow them in a container as long as it's a foot wide, a foot deep. You can grow them with minimal care. And then you can harvest fresh leaves right now, whenever it's growing season. And then you can harvest enough of that to hang and dry to use in the colder parts of the year. So just one plant of mint will provide you at least mint tea for, I would say a quarter of the year. 3, 4, 5 plants of mint are going to give you plenty of mint so that you could literally have a cup of mint tea every single day the entire year that you grew yourself. Other herbs that are prolific are lemon balm and anise hyssop. All three of those herbs grow right in the ground so easily. They come back year after year and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so this is something we all could do is replace our store bought teas with teas that we grow ourselves, even if you're not a homesteader. All right, number two is greens juice. Greens juice is something you could absolutely grow and make every day of the year, no matter where you live, because you have a garden. So a green juice is not necessarily going to have something fruiting things I've seen like Jennifer Garner's and the famous people's green juice. And it usually has like a cucumber or something like that in there. You don't have to have anything fancy like that, we're talking simply greens. So spinach, kale, Swiss chard, parsley, any other kind of deep leafy green that you might want to use to make a greens juice. These you can provide for yourself year round. Here's how. So in the growing season, when you're growing spinach, kale, Swiss chard and parsley, you're going to harvest enough from these plants to make your juice each and every day. But you're going to harvest a lot as these plants get much bigger toward the end of the season. So by month four, month five, these plants start to get really big, start to put off lots and lots of big leaves. That's the time you're going to harvest extra and you're going to dry them, you're going to dehydrate them and then store them up to make greens juice with in the winter season. So you get fresh greens juice basically from spring to fall. And then in the winter season, you're going to get dried greens that you can turn into a juice boom like that. So how do you make your own juice if you don't have a juicer? Well, if you have a high speed blender and a nut milk bag or a cheesecloth, something that has enough space for the juice to come out and the pulp to stay in, then you can absolutely make your own green juice. Right now, I do this every day with a Vitamix and a nut milk bag. So I'll blend up my veggies in the Vitamix with some water, then I'll pour all of that through a nut milk bag, squeeze it tight, let all the liquid run through, drink that as a juice, and then you can use that discarded pulp in the compost pile, turn it into soil that you'll grow next year's greens in. So that's number two, a green juice. Super easy to provide for yourself. Those greens I mentioned, particularly Swiss chard, kale and parsley, those are biennials. That means they want to last in the garden for two whole years at least. These plants are going to last not just through the spring and the fall, they're going to last through the summer too. And so all three of these produce an abundance of leaves. So you'll have enough for your daily green juice, plus you'll have enough to save and store up for the winter months. All right, so we got our tea, we got our juice. But Nicole, is there anything to eat? Yes, there is. And that is, of course, some salad. Now, we're not talking boring box salad. We're talking about real delicious salad that you grow yourself in your garden. So this salad is going to be comprised of the greens we already talked about from the greens. Juice, kale, Swiss chard and spinach. You're also going to have spring mix and arugula and mizunas. You can have purple mustards. You can have all kinds of herbs in there like cilantro and dill and parsley. You can have flowers, all kinds of edible flowers like pansies and violas and marigolds, chive blossoms. You can have green onions and chives and some garlic greens. All kinds of flavors, all kinds of textures, all kinds of colors. That's what we're talking about for a homegrown salad. Now, if you're in a cold place, you're going to have this homegrown salad from like March until October. So you're going to start in this early, early spring and go all the way till the late fall. And you'll be able to grow this kind of salad in your garden every single day of those six months. Then for the six months when you're off, you're going to transition. Instead of having that outside in the garden, you'll switch over to microgreens and sprouts. Those are things you can grow on your windowsill on your kitchen counter. And then you switch over to a sprout and microgreen type salad. Now, what if you're in a mild climate? This is where I am in Nashville. Then our salad season starts around February, and then it runs all the way through the summer. You're going to take a little break. You can still do kale and Swiss chard in the middle of the summer. So we'll just say we're going to keep it going all the way, really until December. So you have a little short break, a shorter break than in the cold climates. December, January and February are really the months where you'll switch over to microgreens and sprouts. But what if you're in a hot climate? How do you have a salad every day in a hot climate? Well, yours is going to be flipped from Chicago from the cold area. You're going to go from October to March when the cold areas are shut down and inside you're wide open, growing tons of salad and eating a salad every day. So October, you plant those greens and you enjoy them all the way through March. And then when it warms up in a hot climate, that's when it gets a little bit challenging. So you'll move on to, like switch chard and kale and mustards, arugula. In the spring, when it starts to warm up in the middle of the summer, that's when you'll either switch to microgreens and sprouts, move those indoors, or you can switch to some alternative greens. Things where you have to get a little bit of an experimental palate, where you don't mind tasting some different flavors. Things like Malabar spinach, New Zealand spinach, and there's another one, longevity spinach. They're all named spinach, but none of them are actually spinach. Go figure. So you can eat those. The kale and the Swiss chard may make it through the summer if they're planted in a good spot and have a little bit of shade to cool them down. So hot climate, mild climate, cold climate, all those climates can have a year round supply of salad you grow yourself. It's going to be a combination of just your typical quintessential salad garden, plus microgreens and sprouts, plus some greens that maybe you've never tried before, not used to, that you can adapt when the seasons change, when the temperatures go up or go down. All right, so we've got three things. We've got a drink, a hot drink, a cold drink, and we've got a salad to munch on. Now the next thing is dishes with veggies, with eggs. Now, I know not everybody listening likes eggs, but listen, this is something I eat every day and I want to show you how you could do it too. I love having a little bit of protein either for lunch or brunch or breakfast. I try to wait a while to eat until it's kind of late in the morning. And this is a favorite of mine, so I started with lots of greens. So in the spring and in the fall, in the salad time, I'm going to harvest lots of greens, green onions, chives, herbs, things like that to put into my omelet or my egg dish. It could be an omelette, it could be a frittata, it could be a scrambled egg, an egg scramble where you scramble all the stuff inside however you want to do it. But basically it's veggies and eggs. So those kinds of things in the cooler parts of the year. Then in the summer, in the warm season, this is when you're going to harvest tomatoes and peppers and onions to put hot peppers too, to put into your omelet or your egg dish. And. And it really kicks it up a notch to this warm season, delicious egg dish. Now, in the coldest part of the Year, let's say if the garden is shut down, this is a time to have some things that are frozen. So some kale you can freeze, some spinach you can freeze. Some chives you can freeze. In order to make those garden fresh meals every single day, even when it's cold outside. So maybe eggs aren't your thing. Whatever kind of protein you love, it's a wonderful thing to mix some greens from the garden with some protein for your breakfast or lunch. It fills you up, makes you feel so good, and you get that amazing nutrients from your garden each and every time that you take a bite. All right, the last thing that you can eat every single day from your garden that I eat most times from my garden are all kinds of herbal dips. So herbal dips and herbal spices are things that I can enjoy year round from my garden. So in the spring, that's when all these things start to grow. So rosemary and thyme, oregano, chives, basil, sage, basil comes a little bit later, but all those start growing right now. Lemon balm, anise, hyssop. And the goal is, each and every time I harvest from them, I want to harvest. Thinking of two times, I want to think about my current day, what I'm going to use it for, and then what I'll use it for in the future. Because the future stuff, I'm going to dry those herbs, to preserve them, to store them, and to use them later on when the weather is not so great and those herbs aren't anymore growing in the garden. So what can we do with all these herbs? Oh, my goodness, what can we not do? So, so many sauces and things you can make. One of my favorites is making a chimichurri, making pestos, making pasta sauces. Any kind of dish that needs a little bit of seasoning, there's an herbal sauce for it. And if you've only tasted like jarred sauces and canned sauces, then you have not lived yet. When you make this fresh chimichurri right from your garden, parsley, oh, my goodness, it's life changing. So sauces like that you can use fresh, and then you can jar them up and either put them in the freezer. If you're into canning. I'm not. But you could store those up for later. You can even just store them as ice cubes. So I've seen lots of people, they'll set up an ice cube tray, pour that sauce into each of the ice cubes, freeze it, stick it in a sealed bag, and then you've got that to use in the cooler parts of the year. So any kind of sauces that you want to make? One of our favorite just easy peasy things we do is we just cut up lots of herbs into an olive oil and sea salt little dipping dish, and everybody gets fresh bread and a dipping dish and just goes to town. This is a super simple addition that you could really have for any dinner. Have you ever been to those Italian restaurants where they come out first with the hot bread and they give you a little dish, pour some olive oil in it, and then, you know, do some little coarse salt? Well, imagine that. Plus all kinds of flavors like chives and oregano and rosemary mixed into that olive oil. That's what my family loves. That's when they know that mom has had a really good day in the garden. But that's something you could do each and every day. So herbal sauces, herbal dips, and then any kind of herbal dishes. So there are so many things you can make with all these herbs, either fresh or dried things, Even desserts. So I've made rosemary and lavender shortbreads. We've made breads. We've made, like, pasta dishes. There are just so many things you can do. You can use these herbs as seasonings on your main course. So if you're into meat or some kind of protein, using those herbal additions to make your dishes so much more delicious and kick the flavor up a notch. All right, so those are five things that you could really, truly eat every single day from your garden. Even if you're not a homesteader, even if you don't have a big garden, even if you've never gardened before, even if your garden is tiny, all the things I listed can grow in a very small space. So let's review. We've got first, our herbal teas. We can have that every single day. Green juices every single day. Green salad every single day. Where are my egg dishes? Or proteins and veggies? Every single day. And then finally, herbal dips and sauces also every single day. Listen, the garden doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be huge, and it doesn't have to be a crazy time commitment on your part. All of us can enjoy all these small things every single day, and they all add up to make a huge difference in our everyday life. Just imagine every morning drinking a cup of tea that you grew yourself. I mean, 365 of those cups. It adds up. Imagine eating a salad every day that you grew yourself. 365 of those salads. They add up. So don't give up. Don't decide already that a garden isn't worth your time or your money or, you know, your energy. It is, because it's going to give back to you, even if it's small and even if you're just starting out. All right, if you want help to know when to grow all these things you can find out@gardenary.com calendar. All you got to do is put in two dates inside that calendar. We tell you all the rest of the dates that you need to know. You're going to love it, and you can get it for free@gardenary.com calendar. 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