Mid May

Well this garden continues to inspire and delight me. I am quite proud of both the timing and amount of food we have eaten thus far this spring. We cooked a stir fry with most of the pok choy on Tuesday night as some heads were starting to bolt; I sowed another row in our lettuce bed which we'll probably be eating in another week or two.

the lone ripe tomato. won't be another one for at least a month.

We harvested our first planting of radishes over the past 2 weeks. Our second planting is swelling so it won't be long before those end up on our plates as well. Our pea vines are flowering and the pods are growing by the minute. We are now completely eating greens from our yard, yet we ask ourselves why it takes so long to get to that point (mid-May versus mid-April). Next year I will sow lettuce in mid-March in a covered bed in addition to starting lettuce really early indoors.

While lettuce gets bitter in the heat of summer I am trying to stick romaine heads in around where our waltham butternut will be vining up, as well as on the north side of our green bean vines. Both will be trellised upwards of 6 feet so I hope we can extend our harvest into mid-July and only have about a month without fresh greens.

Our tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are all flowering and flourishing. We have 7 eggplants, 14 tomatoes, and about 12 bell peppers. I am doing 2 successional plantings of summer squash, one in the orchard bed and one in the raised bed after we harvest our brassicas. I am preparing a hoop house for our watermelon and cantaloupes: stars and moon, yellow doll and minnesota midget. Hopefully with a little extra heat from the landscape fabric and the hoop house we'll get earlier and heavier crops. We'll soon know.

the mighty radish.

salad bed.

tomato/pepper bed with carrots in foreground.

peapods.