Took the day off...

The strawberries just keep coming. I made strawberry cobbler. The garden-neighbor who gave me the starter plants last year told me that the little "bites" we see in some of them (I throw those away) are from slugs. I guess that's a little gross, but I had thought it was rats, so at least we won't get hantavirus.

The beans are almost all the way up the pole.



I tried to plant the sunflowers, but every time they sprouted, something ate them, since they come up with the tantalizing seed still on top. So I decided to plant them indoors. The package said they germinate in 5-15 days, but after 4 days they looked like this:


At 6 days, I took them out to transplant them, and the tap root (longest, main root) for most of them was about a foot long! That's 2 inches a day!



Today I picked the first radish. I thought it might be a little early but I wanted to try one to find out. Not much to look at, but when you slice it....


The package said "crisp and sweet," so I took a big bite... and it's basically like incredibly strong horseradish. Which will be great with seafood! But not so much on its own.

First bouquet:

blurry but nice

Wild Strawberries

It was very exciting last week to pick a whole bunch of strawberries. I knew it was strawberry season because the cafeteria at work was having a "Strawberry Festival." Which is a nice idea, but it tends to be things like "Strawberry-stuffed pork loin."

The beans are finding their way up the poles, which is really neat, because they're a few inches away and we didn't wind them onto there at all.


And those beautiful poppies my neighbor had last year are now growing in our section!

We went back to the garden today, and realized that last week was only the tip of the Strawberry iceberg.

May

Yesterday, we planted two different eggplant seedlings, one "fairytale eggplant" from the garden store and one white eggplant from the same farmer's market as last year's plant. We also planted okra from seed. And, most excitingly, sunflowers from Oma! The packet said they'll be nine to twelve feet high and the flowers will be 20 INCHES ACROSS.

In the meantime, it looks like the chive flowers are actually going to be quite pretty:



Also, the lemon cucumbers have sprouted (see the three little two-leaf things at the base of the fence). And look how many strawberries are growing! We need to figure out how to eat these before the squirrels do....



Last week, there was one lonely lima bean sprout, and that first green bean was just about to unfurl aboveground. This week, they're all out. I feel like at some point in the interim, there was a little "Boing!" sound coming out of our garden patch when they all sprung up.

Beans:

Lima beans:


The blackberries are already flowering! If you click on this, you can see how many clusters are on the branches behind it. I trimmed back about 80% of the branches after last year since it was kind of overwhelming, so I hope the remaining ones are pretty productive.


Finally, here's a flower we actually saw in someone else's yard, on the way to the garden store. They're so cool - the base of each flower is like a perfect rectangular tube: