Celebrate Summer: Inspiration for Garden Gatherings
A garden party of any size can be a wonderful way to celebrate the season of abundance. Many of us are yearning for a little jubilation now more than ever, and a garden is the perfect place to make those memories. At the same time, we may be keeping our gatherings smaller, and looking for ways to make the most of limited time and energy after a couple of difficult years.
If you follow us on Instagram or Facebook, you may have seen some of the tips we shared for creating simple yet memorable garden celebrations. Now we’re compiling those tips here, so you can refer to them any time you’d like!
Whether you’re gathering with friends or enjoying the end of summer with your closest loved ones, we hope these tips will bring an extra joyful boost to your celebrations.
Dress (Your Garden) for the Occasion
The best decorations for a garden party come from the garden itself! With the right combination of everyday items and garden abundance, you can transform your garden into the perfect venue for a special occasion.
Decorations don’t need to be elaborate: Just let your existing garden be your inspiration and guide! Is your summer garden bursting with bold blooms like sunflowers, roses, and dahlias? Or maybe your style tends towards wispy wand flowers and subtle shades. Just a few simple accessories such as candles, ribbons, or tablecloths that complement your garden’s palette can quickly bring the whole space together. It’s all about that rustic-chic ambiance!
To keep freshly-cut botanical decorations thriving throughout your celebration, make sure they’re hydrated! Harvest as close to the party start time as you can, and put their stems in water right away. If they do have to wait at all for a drink, always give the stems a fresh cut first. Vases are a classic option, or you can get creative with mason jars, pitchers, serving bowls, and wine glasses.
A variety of textures and heights boosts visual interest and the spirit of summer abundance. Try clustering complementary containers of different sizes together, each holding a unique combination of blooms. You might even try hanging small vases to draw the eye up.
And don’t limit yourself to flowers! Foliage and even seed pods can make stunning decorations, either combined with more colorful offerings or standing artfully alone.
Simply Delicious Garden Party Dishes
Anybody hungry after all that decorating? There’s no better way to enjoy fresh food from the garden than outdoors in the garden. And it doesn’t take much to elevate super-fresh produce into delicious dishes fit for a special occasion.
We think good garden party food should be a few things:
- Fresh and seasonal,
- Easy to prepare & serve outdoors, and
- Fun & simple to eat (perhaps while lounging on a picnic blanket or sitting by a fire)
Less can be more when showcasing fresh garden or farmer’s market bounty. There’s certainly no need to painstakingly follow a 130 point recipe in a hot summer kitchen! Try serving ribbons of raw cucumbers simply on toasted baguette slices. A sprig of basil and a cherry tomato skewered to a mini mozzarella ball with a toothpick creates a bite-sized caprese salad. And garden-fresh fruit needs no further adornment than a spoonful of honey or a dollop of whipped cream to transform into the perfect summer dessert.
You can take your garden cuisine one step further with an artfully arranged cheese board loaded with seasonal vegetables, fruits, and herby spreads. Basil pesto deserves its reputation, but you can also make delicious homemade pesto spreads with whatever herbs or greens are most abundant — have you ever tried nasturtium leaf pesto adorned with a few vibrant petals? And mixing herbs and edible flowers with cream cheese or goat cheese makes for a fancy-looking yet super-easy spread.
If your garden party plans include a grill, don’t forget to throw some veggies on there! Summer squash, eggplant, and cherry tomatoes are particularly delicious cooked over an open flame, and you could even skewer them all together for some garden-abundance kebabs. And for dessert, how about some grilled plums, pears, or apples?
The Freshest Beverages in Town
But transforming garden bounty into garden party fare doesn’t stop with the buffet table. Why not eat your garden and drink it too? Bottoms up!
From classics like minty mojitos and tomato-rich bloody marys to more original creations, you can use these simple methods to infuse whatever your preferred beverages may be with home-grown flavors.
We’re all just muddling through the best we can right now, so you might as well enjoy a delicious muddled drink. Muddling is basically just gentle mashing, and the key is to not overdo it. You can use a special muddling tool, or just the handle end of a wooden spoon. Muddled mint is the foundation of mojitos, and this method is great for other herbs like pineapple sage or rosemary too. You can also muddle summer fruit like blueberries, or even cucumbers.
Root veggies and greens can also make uniquely delicious additions to drinks, but you’ll probably want to juice them. You don’t need a juicer though! Just chop them up, stick them in a blender with a little bit of water, and then strain the mixture through any clean, thin cloth.
Infusing garden flavors into sugar water or vinegar preserves your harvest for future use. Both simple syrups and shrubs are delicious added to spirits, club soda, or just sparkling water.
For a simple syrup:
just simmer equal parts water and sugar along with your herb or fruit of choice until the sugar fully dissolves, then strain out the solids and store in the fridge for up to several weeks until you’re ready to use it.
To make a shrub:
Cover your chopped up garden bounty with your favorite vinegar in a glass jar, and put the mixture in the fridge to infuse for a couple of days, then strain and store in the fridge for up to a month.
Edible flowers = Instant Elegance
Now that you have your menu figured out, let’s make it pretty. Edible flowers add delightful bursts of color and often subtle yet surprising notes of flavor to food and beverages alike. Let’s talk about a few simple yet elegant ways to use them.
First off, there are so many flowers you can eat! From spicy nasturtiums, to savory radish blossoms, to sweet rose petals and lavender, most gardeners already have some edible flowers going on whether they planted them for that purpose or not. Always check to make sure a flower is edible before eating it, and have fun experimenting.
Of course, you could always just throw your edible flowers on a salad, or use them to garnish any dish you like. But here are a couple of very easy ways to take them to the next level:
Floral ice cubes make any drink instantly fancy. It’s a fact! For crystal-clear cubes, use distilled water, or boil tap water and let it cool. If you want, you can also add fruit juice or simple syrup for color and flavor. Fill your trays halfway to start, then gently press your flowers or petals down so they are slightly submerged. Freeze them like this, then fill the trays the rest of the way up with water and freeze again. Your flowers are now suspended in the middle of the cubes as if by magic!
It’s also ridiculously easy to make candied flowers to adorn your desserts. Just use your fingers or a soft paint brush to coat flowers with egg whites or simple syrup, sprinkle on a good coating of superfine sugar (or regular sugar run through a coffee grinder), and let them air-dry for a day or two, until they are brittle. Then you can use them right away, or store them in an airtight container.
So there you have it: two recipes for edible flowers that are both elegant and easy. Oh, and by the way, you can also use these same methods on herbs for some fabulously fancy edible foliage!
A Moment for Revelry
You might agree, these past couple of gardening seasons have been… a lot. In many ways. We hope that these simple yet special celebration ideas will help you make a little space for revelry in the midst of all the ongoing challenges.
Maybe you’re up for inviting some friends over for a final outdoor gathering or two before the weather turns chilly. Or maybe you just want to add an extra touch of jubilation to a date night or small family dinner. No matter how you’re celebrating, be it in your best garden party outfit or your comfiest PJs, we’re wishing you a joyful close to your summer.