June Tally: $6.75

Since there were peas, there have been more peas and more lettuce, and raspberries and strawberries for grazing. (Okay, there have been two ripe strawberries and a handful of raspberries so far, but it's a start.) Some of the radishes have been all greens and very little below the ground. Any ideas? I heard that radishes are one of the easiest things to grow, so what's going on?

Between the peas and lettuce, I'm estimating we've reaped $6.75 of harvest so far. Pretty minimal, but it's still early, and I'm a rookie.

Finally all of the veggies I started inside are out, and potting them and planting them all was quite a bit of work. There are 5 varieties of tomatoes, two plants of each; one in a pot on the patio, and the other in the garden. It's a bit of an experiment to see where they grow better, and I got tired of buying soil for pots. (Note to self, must learn how to re-use this soil for next year so I don't have to re-buy every year.) There are 6 sweet pepper plants (gypsy) and a few jalapenos. Some in pots, some in the garden. The wee little cucumber is out in a pot, and hope it gets a growth spurt soon.

Oh! And the sweet peas are climbing up their trellis and flowering. Sweet peas remind me of home and growing up. I don't know if we had them every year, but we had them a few times at least, and I really like them.

Here are some patio pictures:

Suddenly there were Peas

It seems like only days ago that I noticed the first flowers on the bush peas, then suddenly there were peas. And they totally caught me by surprise. I don't know why, but I imagined it would be weeks longer before the peas grew. How satisfying after various setbacks involving earwigs, slugs, snails, and other unsolved mysteries (like the beets germinated, but they are totally stalled out, almost no growth beyond the first set of leaves. Why?).

The peas are the second harvest (I picked two today, just for a taste), but the first was actually last week, and I didn't manage to post pictures at the time. I snipped off some lettuce, picked one radish, and some of the first borage leaves (the borage, by the way, is going great gadzooks now, happily blooming flower after flower). I put it all together into a simple yet totally satisfying salad.

Garden Aesthetics

I may not have anything to eat yet, but the garden is beautiful to look at right now. I just put down fresh mulch around the garden beds, and it's so aesthetically pleasing I can't get enough of it. There also is enough greenery now to make it actually look like a garden rather than a patch of dirt. I think I can pick some lettuce leaves and radish any time now, but the spinach was a total dud going to seed before it produced any useful leaves.


Looking at other people's gardens is perhaps even more thrilling than looking at my own, and I just had a cyber tour of Sustainable Eats garden in Seattle. Then there's Garden Therapy in Vancouver and the before and after pictures. Oh why didn't I take a before picture here when it was a mound of dirt, garbage, and the full range of invasive species?

From earwigs to slugs and snails

The European earwigs appear to be gone, and now the slugs are eating my pea leaves and the snails are eating the dahlia I bought. I am coping with slugs and snails and feel that I will pull through this latest invasion without too much of my spirit crushed. It is heartening to hear that expert gardeners also experience losses and setbacks like the dying cucumbers and pole beans that didn't come well in the modern victory garden. I made a trap for the slugs in an old yogurt container filled with yeasty water and found it dug out and overturned by my suspected feline trouble-maker. I put a ring of crushed egg shells around the dahlia and it seems to have kept the snails away last night. Either than or they didn't bother coming back because they'd already completely defoliated the thing and even nibbled on the flower.

Otherwise things in the garden are coming along, slowly with the cool weather. Lettuce should be ready to pick for a small salad soon.

I may not have mentioned yet that we have a giant walnut tree in the yard. As a result of dealing with the harvest last fall, there are cast off walnuts pretty much everywhere, being collected with leaf debris and used as mulch, or tossed in the compost and also ending up the the garden. So now we have little walnut trees popping up everwhere. I've put three in pots to grow them just as a fun experiment, but the rest I have to pull up. Check it out.

Another lovely surprise is the first borage flower today. Thanks for the plant Sonja.

Lawn Treasures

I've turned my focus to flowers this past week. The zinnias I planted outdoors over a month ago barely have their second set of leaves, but the ones I planted indoors more recently are getting huge. When the seed packet gives you the option of planting directly outdoors or starting indoors, they seem neutral on the topic, not giving you an advice one way or the other. How misleading! Oh I have much to learn.

I have poppies popping up outside (free seeds at the community garden), marigolds that survived the earwig rampage of destruction about to bloom, and then I went on a wee shopping spree at Buckerfields on the weekend. Lavender, a dahlia, status, allysum, and heliotrope (the last two for the shady patio in the back. Oh, and the sweet peas I planted ages ago are about six inches tall now, and we installed a trellis on the sunny patio for them to grow up.

But pictured below, are the tiniest, cutest little pansies that I found in the middle of the lawn, managing to flower between mowings to announce their presence. I quickly extracted them from the lawn and planted them in a flower bed. Aren't they amazing? There are two plants, and they're each about 3 inches tall and have lots of blooms.

In vegetable news, I believe I eradicated those European earwigs with my traps of beer and insecticidal spray, either that or they just finished up on their own and died or moved on. Hard to tell. They got 2 broccolis and 5 marigolds, and severely damaged all the carrots and radishes. I'm ready to put that behind me though, and think it's nearly time to plant another row of lettuce, spinach and carrots.