A Vegan Summer Solstice

I hope all of you who observe it had a wonderful Litha! We celebrated on both the 20th and 21st as the Solstice was at 12:24 am on the 21st here in Ohio. We started our celebrations by writing intentions on water bottles and placing them in the bright Solstice sun to make sun water:

I also put my new crystals out to charge:

We checked on our little garden, and the mint is doing very well:

The parsley is taking over this pot and crowding the lavender. Our poor cilantro has flowered from the high temperatures lately so we will let it go to seed and use the coriander seeds later. We are going to have to move the lavender so it has a chance to grow:

The tomatoes are growing nicely and there were even a few ripe enough to pick:

We never got around to removing the flowers from our chives because my mom thought they were pretty! Fortunately, there are still usable chives:

Our basil looks ok but just isn’t growing much. The rosemary is great, but both the dill and thyme are flowering:

Here are some other plants in our yard. Most are probably weeds, but I like them anyway! I liked the moths flittering about too!

We picked some herbs and I made little rolls with the fresh herbs and some sun-dried tomatoes:

I also cut some mint and used it to make mint lemonade. It was perfect for the hot Solstice day!

I used the little herb rolls to make sliders with baby portabella mushrooms, spinach leaves, tomato slices, an herbed aioli, and some caramelized onions. They were really good!

Then we took our dried up Yule tree we have been saving and cut off the branches. We saved the trunk for our Yule log this year, and used the branches as part of the wood for our Litha bonfire:

We lit the fire when it was starting to get dark:

The dry branches caught on fire quickly and the fire burned quite hot for awhile and then settled down as the fire burned through the branches:

We got our ingredients ready to make S’mores for dessert. I love Dandies vegan marshmallows and these mini vegan chocolate bars from Aldi worked very well. The graham crackers are homemade and are both gluten free and vegan:

The fire had died down perfectly for toasting marshmallows and the S’mores were perfect:

At midnight, we wrote out our intentions again, but this time on bay leaves:

Then we burned them in our Litha fire at the time of the Solstice:

I had planned to be up before sunrise to watch the Solstice sun come up, but I forgot to set my alarm! I was very disappointed, but I went outside and stood in the sunlight for awhile at about 8 am. Here is a photo from Stonehenge to make up for my missing one:

I made lemon raspberry scones for breakfast. They were scrumptious, but I learned to only use fresh raspberries as the frozen ones melted and made my scones spread out too much. I still ate three!

Then, I made a loaf of gluten free and vegan bread and we had assorted sandwiches for lunch:

I just love avocado toast!

The peanut butter & jelly and the vegan “egg” salad were really delicious too!

That was the end of our Summer Solstice celebration for this year. We had a wonderful time and I hope you enjoyed seeing how we celebrated Litha as vegans!