Our beautiful backyard

This year we planted a garden in our backyard.

It's kind of funny that last year in the same section, we planted grass. Before that there was just a big pile of dirt in that section of our yard. We made three levels of beautiful lawn going down to the edge of the garage for our wedding on June 21st, 2009. Christine and I have now been married for just over a year and on our first anniversary, Horizon Distributors launched our Breakfast Cookie as a new product. It was a very exciting day for us and we celebrated by going to Vij's for dinner.

Anyway back to the garden. Our tenants, Jeff and Flo have helped enormously. We already had raspberries, black currants and saskatoon berries along the side of the fence and a cherry tree out front. Now we also have lettuce, carrots, beets (my favourite are golden beets), potatoes, leeks (for my goat cheese, leek and onion tart) tomatoes of all different size, radishes, endives, peppers, squash, eggplants, herbs and an artichoke for Christine. There is only one artichoke and maybe next year there will be more. I was so excited to find the seeds that I had to try it out and it is actually growing but apparently it is alot like asparagus. It takes a long time to get food out of it.

For quick eating gardens, I think lettuce is pretty good. I planted a seed mix and the red and green romaine that is coming out of it is gorgeous. We have been eating caesar salads with our own homemade dressing and it is amazing. We bought a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano and are slicing it and putting thin slices of cheese in the salad with a traditional dressing with anchovies, egg, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil. If you do not eat cows milk cheeses, there are some beautiful sheep milk cheeses that are similar, like Pecorino Romano which is what we usually get for pasta dishes.

I hope you like the picture of our beautiful Garden.