Goodbye spinach, hello peas

written by Yvonne

Here is what's happening this week in TYs Veggie Patch.  Potatoes are still growing.

Beans have taken off like crazy. We planted two kinds and they both have gotten big FAST!

See what I mean?

A couple of beets are trying to come up, but we'll likely have to pull them out to plant more summer crops before they get to full maturity.

The pea pods are here! The pea pods are here! The flower blossoms have turned into full blown pea pods. Saturday we harvested the biggest ones and ate a few right then and there.

Lettuce is coming along. Hopefully they will get to full maturity before it gets too hot.

This is the last of the spinach (see more about spinach later).

Thanks to friends and family, we now have three different kinds of mint attempting to take root along the back fence. We were given some by Tom's bee mentor Richard, some from my student and friend Vivian, and a third kind from Tom's brother Dan.

How cool is this? For any of you who have grown berries, this is probably not very exciting or impressive. But to me, this is just really cool!

You can't see from this picture but there are green things growing in this bed where we scattered lemon grass and lavender seeds.  But as usual, never having planted either before, don't know what green things are the plants and what are weeds. So we'll keep watering them and see what starts to look like something.

The apples are growing, but for now it's just a fun thing to watch develop.

Now it's your turn to play "Guess What This Item is in TYs VeggiePatch."  We noticed this bush along the fence.  We didn't notice this last year but it has these odd, misshapen fruits(?) on them. The two pictures after this are shots of the leaves and of the pant as a whole. Anyone have a guess at what it is?

These are actually our neighbor's peonies. They are so beautiful, aren't they?

Back to the spinach. It was time for all the spinach to come out.  Here are the two beds worth of spinach plants. It amounted to about 5.5 lbs of spinach.

I read a tip that I hadn't tried until now which is to get large pans of water and rinse your vegetables in them while you're outside, then dump that water back onto your garden.  This versus doing what we did previously which was to rinse them in the sink and then just let the water drain out. Anytime it's possible, this will be the way the veggies get their first wash.

Time for a break. Guess what we did with some of the mint we received?  Frozen Mojitos! 

And here the rinsing water back into the garden.

I guess this lady bug wanted to take a bath along with the spinach.

It's hard to tell what part of Olive you're looking at here but this is her. She's completely passed out after an hour or so of non-stop play at Dan's horse ranch with her cousins Cake and Tulip.  She saw a horse for the first time (which she was very leery of), and she played in water for the first time too.  It took her a while to decide if she was going to follow her cousins into the creek, but eventually she went in and got her feet wet.