Eva Carlson's Senior Project: Garden to Garnish

END OF PROJECT REFLECTION       I can confidently say that over the past four weeks there has been a lot of learning curves. From figuring out how to get my plants to grow and protect the growth that they have had I have had to use all parts of my problem-solving brain. I have also improved my skills in the kitchen and become particularly more confidant in making bases for drinks with the herbs from the garden. One of our original goals was to be more creative in our recipes and cooking. I find that it is very easy to become accustomed to making the same things that you are comfortable with, so during these four weeks we wanted to challenge ourselves to use different ingredients and different methods than we have in the past. I feel like this goal was accomplished and most shown in the use of our herbs. Knowing that there we would need to buy some foods and products we wanted to support the local businesses when we could. Since COVID financially impacted the smaller ...

This week we chose to focus on our lettuce plants. These were basically fully grown and we thought that they would be great to use! We knew that we could obviously make salads but we felt that that seemed to be slightly boring and we wanted to mix it up. After doing some research we then realized that lettuce is not very versatile in meals. It really just serves on purpose. However, I did grow some kale, and put that is some smoothies that I made which were pretty good. The other plants in my garden are growing quite well. The mint plant is getting very large, and the leaves are also getting big. Next week I am planning on using the mint for many different things. I would like to make a mint simple syrup, and I think that I would also like to use it in some blended drinks like smoothies. The lavender is also growing some more the places that we cut off to use earlier are also growing quite a bit. So maybe in the next week or two, we will be able to use more lavender again. My strawbe...