I’ve been busy with personal stuff this week, so not much cooking going on. Except for last night when I taught the first of my 3-class series at Les Gourmettes. Today I’m going to catch you up on what’s been going on around my house and give you a valuable tip for cutting fig leaves and branches.

I have four fig trees in my backyard, which is three too many for my needs, but I’m going with the flow. I use the figs, of course, but I also put the fig leaves to good use on the Harmony Boards. They are best used under very soft cheeses and also when mixed in with other greens for the base of our Crudités and Frudités Boards, as seen above. All of the leaves on the board above are from my yard. We’ll talk more about the garden in a moment. First I want to tell you about the issue I was having with the fig leaves.

When fig leaves or branches are cut, they immediately begin to wilt, even when quickly put into water. I don’t know if this is caused by the milky fluid they put out when they are cut or exactly what it is that causes the wilting, but it’s annoying.

I discovered that if the stem gets a fresh cut under cold running water or is cut while immersed in water, the leaves are quickly revived. They will look great for days. Amazingly, the leaves will even stay unwilted when pulled out of the water several minutes later when I use them for a board.

When I was getting ready to post these photos I was thinking, “why should my readers believe that the wilted photo was taken first and the revived photo of fresh-looking leaves taken after?”

Why, indeed?!? To prove that this is the case, here are the same photos with their timestamps. The photo above was taken at 8:06 AM and the photo below was taken at 8:40 AM. See, wilted and then refreshed after being recut under cold water. Like Magic!

Do you remember a few posts back when I shared my excitement over finally being able to grow something, besides herbs, in a garden?

Well, are you ready to see the surprise harvest?

The surprise is that I forgot what I’d planted. I thought it was zucchini and watermelon but turns out it was watermelon, cantaloupe, and English cucumber. This weekend I had another wonderful surprise!

The watermelon was not your run-of-the-mill red-fleshed watermelon, it is yellow!

I had completely forgotten I had planted the super cool yellow instead of the everyday red. I was overjoyed but honestly a little disappointed too.

Disappointed because I’d looked for yellow watermelon in the market when I was creating the Harmony Board for Lisa’s birthday last week but I could not find any. And there it was – in my own backyard the entire time. Doggone it!

When shopping for the board, I may not have found the melon I wanted, but I did find yellow kiwi at Costco. Did you even know there was such a thing? I discovered it a couple of summers ago, but this was the first time I saw it at Costco. The green kiwi is the smaller fuzzy one on the left. The yellow is slightly larger and has no fuzz.

Just as with the watermelon, they taste much like their everyday cousins.

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I hate to admit it, but I’ve never been much of a gardener. I’ve had an herb garden my entire adult life, so I can grow herbs, mostly cooking herbs. And I’ve always had fruit trees, but that’s not gardening.

I’ve tried to grow tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, radishes, peas, pumpkins, eggplant, okra, and even zucchini. I’ve had success with not a single one! Not even zucchini!

Everyone else I know in the gardening gig grows zucchini no problem, every harvest season I see them begging people to take their surplus. I’m so jealous! If that wasn’t bad enough, many of them even put my herb garden to shame.

This year it’s different. I don’t know if it’s the new house, a new garden, new dirt, or new attitude, but I’m a farmer now!

But it turns out I’m not really a farmer because I thought the photo above was a zucchini. I forgot what I’d planted. It’s a cucumber. Not a farmer.

Here is that same cucumber a few days later.

And here is my current harvest of cucumbers. Why is there Ketel One behind the cucumbers? Because my friend, Jen, told me about the new Ketel One Botanicals. I love the idea of them. They are lower in alcohol and calories. Botanical is vodka distilled with real botanicals and infused with natural fruit essences.

I made a delicious cucumber martini with the Cucumber Mint Botanical and my homegrown cucumber.

Back to the garden, I was also successful with cantaloupe and watermelon.

I’ve harvested that lovely perfectly round watermelon above and now I’m waiting for these weird-shaped ones to be ready.

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A month can seem like a long time or fly by in a minute. I’ve experienced both on my backyard remodel.

It took only one month for the wonderful people at Garden Plus Landscape & Pools to tear out my old backyard and install something beautiful and new.

And it’s taken an entire month for me to round-up and Photoshop all the photos so that I can finally get this post up. No time like the present, so let’s get on with it! These first four photos are the renderings that Garden’s Plus presented me with.

Lovely, aren’t they?

The rest will be the before, the between (the progress) and the after photos.

As a refresher; in May 2017, I moved out of a 4,000 sq ft house that I’d lived in for 18 years, into a 2,000 sq ft rental that also served as my storage space. Then in November 2017, I moved into this 3,000 sq ft house. I adore this house and it felt like home immediately.

Well, except for all the excess stuff that was piled deep and high on the back patio and along the very narrow eve on the north side of the house.

Thankfully it doesn’t rain in AZ very often! If it did, there would have been much more of this situation.

It all felt so very claustrophobic, suffocating and downright awful.

To rid myself of that stuff and those less than warm and fuzzy new home feelings, I needed to pare it down and spread it out. The paring down came in the form of a garage sale on March 3rd and 4th.

And the beginning of being able to spread it out began at the same time, in the form of a new covered patio that would be nearly 3x the size of the original covered patio.

This is something that has been in the works for a while now. The original covered patio needed revamping because it was just so damaged. It didn’t look good in terms of appearance and it was probably even dangerous to walk on. So, this is why we are all super excited to contact somewhere like this Milwaukee Concrete Brick Edging service to get it recovered with better material. This will definitely add some spice to our renovation project.

How amazing does that sound? I’ve always dreamed of having a great patio space that will allow us to spend more time outdoors so we can make the most of our surroundings. This is what it’s for, after all. To expand the life and workability of the pool deck and walkways, we decide to look into construction materials that are resilient to all weather conditions. We may look into concrete flooring options, perhaps consult a BM Concrete Reno or in our neighborhood, so that we can utilize our outdoor space to the fullest. Moreover, there are just so many options that you can take advantage of when it comes to your patio space that I’m slightly worried that it could become dirty as soon as it’s fitted. And, of course, I would hate for this to happen straight off the bat.

When I told my friend about my initial concerns, she told me to get in touch with a professional pressure washing service like Malachi Exterior Wash (www.pressurewashingclarksvillemalachiexteriorwash.com) to come as often as is needed to ensure that every inch of my patio, as well as my driveway and walkways, have all been cleaned to the highest quality. And as soon as she said this, it filled me with great joy and relief.

Knowing this bit of information allows me to enjoy the renovation process and to take in every second.

At the same time, the chipping plaster and cracking border tile of the original pool needed to come out and be replaced with new tile, coping and pebble finish. The old cement under the long but narrow covered patio, the faded cool-deck and a good part of grass area were to be replaced with travertine.

A built-in gas grill with dinning table was getting built, along with a beautiful accent wall/planter, which was inspired by a vintage French wall fountain I scooped up at Sweet Salvage several years ago.

Being installed in between the accent wall/planter and the pool, an eye-catching harlequin-pattern of travertine tile and faux grass. I’d love to take credit for that design element, but all credit goes to Adrian at Garden’s Plus. He spotted the French fountain among all the stuff piled on the patio and came up with the idea and design.

Had he told me that the first order of business to upgrade your patio was to get everything off the patio, or not, that’s what I somehow wanted to do. I moved all the boxes into the garage and figured out what would be kept and what was to go in the sale. I moved all the outdoor furnishings onto an extra-large tarp in the grass on the far north side of the yard and then the guys covered it with more tarps to protect it from possible rain. It rained for two days before I was able to move stuff to the grass, but it hasn’t rained since … that was February 27th.

Note: As if to prove me a liar, it rained only hours after I pushed “schedule” on this post. Yes, it rained last night! Hallelujah! Praying it’s raining up north and helping put out or at least control the Tinder Fire.

Actually now that I look at the photos, I remember that the guys started putting up the masonry columns even before I moved my stuff off the patio. That seriously lit a fire under me and put the pressure on!

This was travertine delivery day. In a future post, I’ll share with you all the drama that occurred on granite delivery day. It was quite the thing.

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I have the most beautiful and bountiful pomegranate tree in my backyard.

I had the tree planted when we did a complete remodel of our yard, five years ago.

It produces bigger and better-looking fruit each year.

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I’ve only cooked one night, my dad’s birthday dinner, in over a week! That is so NOT like me, it’s such a rarity that it has probably been 3 or 4 years since it last happened. Well, if you exclude out-of-town vacations, that is.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I have nothing to share with you, recipe-wise. But I still have a few things to show you – Baseball. Gardening. Shopping! All of the photos were taken with my iPhone, the top two, were with a special camera app that I cannot recall the name of.  Marissa, will you please help me out with the answer?

I’ll begin with baseball. Dave and I went to our first Diamondbacks game of the season. We split season tickets with 8 or 9 other people. They are great seats in the third row behind the DBacks dugout. It was a total bust of a game though. Our guys lost to the Braves for the second night in a row. We left in the top of the 8th when the score was Braves – 7 and DBacks – a big fat ZERO. The final was 9 -1, Ouch! Let’s move on to something more pleasant, shall we? Shopping!

On Thursday, Peggy and I made our monthly trek to Sweet Salvage and I found several treasures. My favorite is this basket. I love the worn leather detail.

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I’ve been working on something VERY BIG for the last couple of days and it will come to full fruition on Sunday… so I shall tell you all about it next week.  Until then…

I took a bunch of pictures of our yard when it was just beginning to bloom and then again yesterday…  I’m going to share with you some of the progressions. The bunnies and quail are year-round residents.  And you may recall my drama-trauma baby quail story from last year at about this time… if not, please do check it out HERE! It’s quite the story.  To avoid the same sequence of events this year, here is what I did to the “quail pot” next to our pool.

I had to do it! Those darn quail came back to nest again and I had to chase them off so they would find another place to lay their eggs. I thought they would have learned their lesson. But no!  First I stuck a bunch of cardboard between the plant and the pot, but they still tried to get in there. So the bubble wrap went in and that seemed to do the trick. Thank goodness, I could not deal with that again!

OK, so my yard is blooming like crazy right now and I am in love with it. We didn’t have any hard freezes this past winter and everything is big and healthy, so I’m taking it all in while I can.

The “centerpiece” of the yard is this orchid tree. It’s pretty enough most of the year, but in the spring… it is a stunner!

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It looks as though I won’t be able to tour the “urban farm” for another week or so. To fulfill my garden tour desire, Kim took me to Sandy’s gorgeous garden with a lovely Garden Arch. Kim and Sandy are longtime BFF’s and live only a few blocks from each other. Although Kim’s neighborhood is not horse property, Sandy’s is. But instead of horses in the corral, Sandy has a huge, beautifully planned, and lovingly maintained raised vegetable garden.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words – I will keep my words to a minimum and just let you admire what I had the pleasure of not only visiting but also the delight of harvesting from.

There are lettuce, arugula, and celery “volunteers” all along the west edge.

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I picked my first artichokes of the season today! Plus another 40 or 50 pounds of lemons! Really, someday, I will have picked that lemon tree clean… but not for a while. Only two artichokes were ready, so this recipe is for two, it can easily be doubled or tripled, no matter how many more artichokes you add.  But only go up to 1 1/2 cups of water to cook them in and no more than about 5 tablespoons olive oil.  When increasing recipes, know that not all ingredients increase in equal increments.  For instance, even if you double or triple the onion/garlic/thyme/fennel portions, you still will only need about 1 tablespoon of olive oil to sauté them in… that make sense?

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