not so secret garden...

so a few weeks ago when i went to Hamilton to the Beehive Craft Fair, my mom and i made a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens. surprisingly i had never been there, even though i've driven passed it probably every other weekend for 3 years. but i'm really glad we went to check it out. we went to the Rock Garden area first, then to the big main building. it was so gorgeous out, such a perfect day for walking around a garden.

fresh from the garden...

we've got quite the nice vegetable and herb garden going on this summer. yesterday we pulled all of these green beans out and steamed them up for dinner. sooo tasty and fresh!!

made at home: herb and garlic cream cheese...

we have quite the herb garden growing this summer, so we decided to make our own cream cheese. i chopped up garlic chives, basil, parsley and a little bit of lemon grass and added it to plain cream cheese. it tastes really good, so nice a fresh! and i think that by tomorrow morning for breakfast the flavours will have settled a bit and taste even better!

spring flowers...

so its been raining here most of the week, but when it stopped for a while the other day i went out and took some photos of our tulips in the back yard. i love the colour of the ones we've got growing this year, all oranges and pinks. i think its gonna be quite the gardening summer. my man has been growing impatiens from seed, and when the tulips come out of that part of the garden the impatiens will go in. and we've got some vegetables started that should go in the ground soon too. i'll show you photos of the little greenhouse that we've got going in the kitchen soon.

greenhouse trip...

last night i had a fun night out with my mom and a fun group of women. we went out to a huge greenhouse just outside the city and had a tour of a part of the greenhouses and then a demo. i loved it. being in the greenhouses with all of the beautiful plants made me feel like there was some hope that spring was starting! and the colours. ohh man, makes me want to dye some new work right now! it was pretty inspirational. then after we walked around we had a little talk about herbs, and got to see what all of the different ones look and smell like. and then we cut a ton of them up and made a delicious fresh herb cream cheese. and then we got to plant our own little gardens. i picked a garlic chive, basil and lemon grass, and i'm pretty excited to add my fresh herbs into some cooking. i'm really starting to look forward to our garden this summer, i'll post more about that later, my man is quite the gardener and has grown his own fleet of impatiens from seeds!
this first photo is my little herb planter!





(ohh and i have an exciting post tomorrow, well at least i'm excited, we've started renovating my studio room!)