Last week I was able to go to the garden for some dinner inspiration.
I snipped some lettuce (mostly buttercrunch but also some romaine and black simpson), cilantro, a couple of collard leaves, and pulled out an onion. All of which made a pretty good salad! The collard green leaves are so sweet, it was a surprising flavor.
We had a couple of garden intruders this week. A big fat bunny chewed its way through our netting fence to reach the beans. Davey followed the rabbit into the garden, bending a fence post when he got caught up in the wires, but somehow he didn't trample a single plant (he's a lucky dog). The rabbit pretty much wiped out our bean crop, though.
Sad little bean plants with their heads snipped off by a hungry rabbit.
I'm not giving up on the beans, though. I planted 18 more green bean seeds and 12 more edamame seeds yesterday. Once they sprout I will put a chicken wire cage around the plants as a double barrier against rabbits. Time will tell if we get to eat any home grown beans this year.
What i have given up on is the spinach. It never really grew well and started bolting (flowering, which signals the end of it's growing life). The problem is that the spinach never got big enough for us to pick and eat. I discovered through some online research that spinach is pretty finicky and usually bolts in May when the weather gets warm. I think from now on we'll only plant a fall crop of spinach, that seems to be only time of year that we have any success with it.
Bolted spinach, about to be plucked.
The one thing I'm beginning to love about gardening is that the failure of one crop means you get to start new with with something else. Since I pulled out the 4 squares of spinach I had some extra space, so I bought some seedlings and planted one plant of Black Beauty Eggplant and one plant of icebox watermelon. I've never grown either plant so this should be a good (and hopefully delicious) learning experience.
Kris spotted the first signs of the tomatoes to come - a very welcome sight!
Can you see it? Our Roma tomato plant is the winner for producing the first green tomato. At this rate we'll be eating fresh tomatoes by the 4th of July.
As I was picking grass and weeds out of the mulched area around the rain barrel, I discovered another surprise visitor to the yard...
During a trip to Home Depot yesterday I spotted some plants on clearance and even though I had decided against buying plants this year, somehow 2 of the plants jumped into my cart and came home with me.
They have an unfortunate name - Tickseed. Ticks are nasty, but I love the tickseed. They give the backyard that little bit of pop it desperately needed.
Do you see that plant in the background above? I've declared that to be the world's largest bush of parsley. Or at least it's the biggest one I've ever seen. I wish I liked parsley more because we have an abundance of it. I snipped off some flowers last night and smelled like parsley for the rest of the day. We love that fact that it came back stronger than ever this year. Now we just need to eat it.
I finished all of the planting yesterday with the seeds I already have. I added one mound each of cantaloupe and honey dew, 2 hills of cucumbers, and I replanted the birdhouse gourds since they never sprouted.
After a long day of weeding and planting, it was nice sitting on the porch swing with Kris in the evening, enjoying the view of the garden and dreaming about the day when it will be overflowing with deliciousness.
