I have a long weekend coming up, and hope that I am disciplined enough to spend some of it in the garden. It is time to lightly fertilize the young summer season plants, as they should have a large growth spurt now that we have had both rain and some truly warm days. I also need to plant a second round of summer squash and cucumbers, so I have new plants getting ready to produce when the first planting winds down. For harvest? Snap peas and more snap peas.
This week has included two abundant harvests of sugar snap peas, and the vines remain full. I have gathered all we could stand to eat, plus a few bags for the freezer (blanched in boiling water first, of course, to denature the enzymes that otherwise would severely reduce the quality of the frozen veges). Check out this basket from last evenings harvest. They are beautiful. The hens will not, however, eat the strings that I remove when preparing these. I wonder why not?
Here you also see a beautiful, young basil plant. I am pinching off the tops of each branch every time it grows another joint, and it is beginning to bush out nicely. I have these planted in the same bed as the tomatoes, making it easy to pick all I need for an amazing lunch or dinner omelet. The other photo is of a tiny herb bed I have around one of my house pilings, right outside my car door when I get home. Until this week it was a mass of weeds, but I finally sat down one evening and pulled them all out. I am not sure what that tiny tree is there among the herbs (looks a little like a redbud!), but I dug it up and moved it to another bed.
Finally, a coneflower. I love coneflowers. I don't know why, but I do. This one is new to me: it is scented! I found it at the nursery last week. I look forward to seeing how it does in my survival test yard.
