I really don’t know how it happened, but, suddenly, it’s been more than a month since I’ve given you all an update on the garden. There have been, well, some ups and some downs.
First of all, we have the saga of the tomatoes:
The tomatoes above are large, beautiful, flowering specimens that Zac bought from our local nursery as a present to cheer me up. Like a fool, I gambled, and, during the first week of April, set out about 50 tomato seedlings and 50 pepper seedlings.
You can guess what happened next.
After they all met their frosty demise, we figured that the only thing to do was regroup and plant more seeds. Thus, the rest of our tomatoes look like this one:
I’m also cherishing a few other warm-weather babies– we have a whole bed of the seductively-named Petit Gris de Rennes melons, arranged 3 or 4 to a hill:
In other ventures, the peas have begun to climb the garden fence (speaking of peas, this article just made me want to die):
The thinned-out lettuces are heading:
The yet-to-be-thinned lettuces are screaming to be eaten:
and, waiting in the wings, we have more of the same– we’re succession planting!
Speaking of, I’ve been enjoying the heck out of this book lately– did you know that Thomas Jefferson ordered the planting of a thimbleful of lettuce, every Monday morning?
The garlic that we’ve been wintering over is shamefully weedy, but beautiful:
Our true success story, though, is these potatoes. Zac bought a 50-lb bag of seed potatoes at our grocery store (the perks of a country grocery store are few, but seed potatoes are one of them) a few weeks ago, and, for the longest time, nothing came up.
Then, almost overnight, they erupted from their tubers:
We’ll be eating new potatoes in less than a month!
In the alium bed, we have two trenches of leeks that one of our recent farmstay guests (Hi, Emily!) helped me transplant:
and, father down, is a section of green onions which are 1) perennial and 2) bunching.
This means, basically, “lots of green onions, forever.” Nothing at all wrong with that!
The one thing that is ready to harvest (besides the lettuce, which we’re eating daily) is the French Breakfast Radishes.
But I’ll show you those beauties tomorrow, because I want to share a few recipes that go along with them. See you then!
