We haven’t seen anything close to a summer-like temperature here in southwest Indiana yet but already watermelons are plentiful at the grocery store. They sport stickers from Mexico, Arizona, and several other points down in the desert southwest. I envision them arriving by the truckload, sun-baked with sly grins and heavy sunglasses, smitten with their departure from their first flirts with triple-digit heat. The quintessential summertime fruit has a real knack for cooling you off and that’s why I thought this recipe for Watermelon Lemonade just had to be shared.

Want to kick it up a notch and make it into a summertime cocktail perfect for sipping in the shade of your front porch? Try adding a splash of gin, vodka, or tequila. I’ve got a bottle of prickly pear vodka that would probably pair perfectly with this!

1 mini seedless watermelon
8 ounces lemon juice
2 cups frozen strawberries
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups ice

Slice the mini watermelon in half, using a spoon to scrape all of the fruit from the center of the melon. Place in a large blender.

Add the lemon juice, strawberries, sugar, and ice to the blender. Blend until pureed.

Pour lemonade straight from your blender, or pour into a pitcher. For an extra fun way to serve this drink, pour it into the two empty halves of the watermelon, add a skewered strawberry and lemon for garnish, then slurp your lemonade from a straw!

I’ve heard stories of everyone’s bulbs being confused in one way or another, flowering trees getting blasted with an icy wind just as they reached full bloom, and early spring garden seeds struggling to make a go of the damp and cold soils.

I know here at the Half-Acre Homestead we feel like the pressure is on. The gardening chore list seems to get longer by the week as the weather delays us more and more. A fresh crop of spring veggie sprouts sat under our grow light in our sunroom for about 3 months before the temps were finally just right for setting them out. Pea seeds, planted about 3 weeks ago have finally emerged after a week-long streak of temperatures stretching into the 70-degree range during the day.

Our backyard flock of chickens seem to be throwing their wings up too. We’ve gone from a lovely 6 eggs-a-day laying streak down to sometimes just one or two a day. Maybe our ladies are protesting their temporary “flockdown“. Maybe I threw them off their schedule when I disconnected their overnight heat lamp (now back on so our girls don’t get the shivers at night and maybe to coax out some more eggs). Maybe it’s just the seasonal change and the weird weather fluctuations.

If you’re at a loss as to what you should be doing in the garden this time of year, check out the Ready, Set, Grow blog hosted by our friends over at Timber Press. The blog is packed with weekly advice, techniques, and tips from a whole panel of garden experts. You can also enter to win a huge prize pack of a library’s worth of gardening books, organic seeds, and organic fertilizers. That prize pack is sure to sow plenty of ideas for many gardening seasons ahead!

Between our clay soil thick enough to make pottery with, our rambunctious Black Lab/Queensland Healer mix named Dixie, and 7 chickens, the grass takes quite a beating in the winer months. In fact, there isn’t a single blade visible for as far as the eye can see. That’s not very far in our case since the yard is about as big as a postage stamp.

Bertha and her pals do seem to be looking longingly at the outside world but they seem to be fairing very well after being taken off their “free range” status. The perennial flower beds already seem to be making a speedy recovery since they’re not being pecked and scratched to death. Hopefully we can get a nice lawn going and eliminate the dustbowl/mud bog for good! Even though I’ve read the book, I’m still not sure how Jessi Bloom does it. She must have some well-trained chickens.

Lemon-Mint Window Wash

Ingredients:
Juice from 1 lemon
2 cups club soda
1/2 tsp peppermint essential oil
1 tsp cornstarch

Mix all ingredients. Pour into plastic spray bottle, and enjoy sparkling clean windows with a heavenly fresh scent! Make a stinky trash can smell fresh again with this simple green trash can deodorizer.

Tea Tree Deodorizer

Ingredients:

1 cup baking soda
1 tsp. tea tree oil

Mix together in a small bowl, working out all the lumps with a fork. Sprinkle mixture in bottom of trash can after liner is removed. Periodically rinse container with white vinegar and leave to dry in the sun. The UV rays from the sun will also work to kill any remaining germs and odors.

Enter the Chocolate Lava Cake for two made without nary a drop of flour. The ingredient list contains nothing exotic and takes only 10 minutes to prepare, another 10 to bake. How does that work you ask? It rises and bakes like an egg soufflé but with all the chocolatey goodness of a warm, moist cake. If you want that molten chocolate center, make sure to pull your ramekins a minute or so early. If you let it go to the timer, you’ll end up with less chocolate lava in the center. Don’t fret if you do because both ways are delish!

These single serving Chocolate Lava Cakes should satisfy any chocolate lover whether they're GF or not.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Lava Cake for Two

• 1/2 stick butter
• 2 oz. (1/4 c.) semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp. vanilla

Here’s to hoping you and your Gluten-Free Valentine have a very happy day!

Enter a new book with a whole new take on fresh eating: The Speedy Vegetable Garden by Mark Diacono and Lia Leendertz. This innovative new book is packed full of a nutrient most people overlook…fresh sprouts. Sure, there is some discussion on the usual, run of the mill alfalfa sprouts you might find offered at your favorite local deli. This book goes so far beyond boring old sandwich sprouts though. At a glance, readers can quickly learn how to grow each type of sprout, how long it will take before they can harvest those sprouts and finally what they can do with the finished produce.

Almost instant gratification can be had by growing some of these speedy vegetables. Some are ready to harvest within hours of planting. Others are ready within days. Want to learn how to grow something a little more substantial? They also cover quick-growing relatives of some longer-to-ripen vegetables like French beans or cherry tomatoes. Packed full of tantalizing photos and a recipe that goes along with each of the 50 quick crops highlighted, the authors really leave the reader with no excuse to try speedy vegetable gardening on their own.

I’ve only had this book in my hands a few days and have already sprouted some garbanzo beans and tried out the recipe for fresh humus. Now I’m hooked! Enter to win a copy of The Speedy Vegetable Garden below thanks to our friends over at Timber Press publishing.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

After one of our first hard freezes in the fall, Homestead Hottie dug up a very stringy tomato plant that never did much. We planted it late, in a weird spot in the front yard and it just sort of languished there. I’ll blame it on the neighbor’s cigarette butts that often decorated its base. Seriously. That tomato was one hot mess but Talina dug it up anyway, planted it in a pot and brought it into the sunroom/den inside.

That tomato has continued looking lanky, covering most of the 4-foot tall window it sits in. It did put out a flush of new growth though and even set fruit around Christmas thanks to our “hand diddling” of the flowers. That’s right, we pretend we’re a bee and we finger all the flowers to pollinate them. We know have a handful of fresh, window-ripened cherry tomatoes to top our next salad with. It’s an exciting and unexpected taste of summer in the doldrums of winter!

We did the same with three pepper plants that survived the first frost. We now have one hot pepper that’s growing bigger every day and another that just needs to turn red already. Can anyone say home office salsa? So this next gardening season, consider moving some plants inside to a bright sunny windowsill and see if you can keep them growing. They might even reward you with a treat of something fresh to eat in the middle of winter.

Last but not least, our seeds have started sprouting underneath that new grow light we bought for a song. The seedlings look really good. They’re definitely much stronger looking than our window sprouted seedlings from last year and they certainly germinated faster. It took just 4 days for most of them to emerge!

In my opinion, it has already paid for itself. Now we just have to wait on Mother Nature so we can shuffle these early spring seedlings out to the garden and then get the summer fruits and veggies started too. Gardening season can’t get here soon enough.