Is it Spring, or is it Summer?

written by Yvonne

It's summer. Now it's spring. No, definitely summer.  Oops, wrong again - spring.  And thus, our weather lately.  For about three nights, it was cold enough that we had to pull the cover cloths out to cover up the early spring items we'd planted. Just about everything did well because it warmed up nicely during the day, although there may have been one casualty... read on.

All of the white flowers on these vines are berries!  I'm more excited about this than just about anything we've grown to date.

I managed to get one of Tom's workers doing some pollinating (or at least I think this is one of his bees - I couldn't quite see her T's Bees branding tattoo.)  You can also see the berry has formed - it's the middle section of the flower. Once the petals have fallen off, the berry is what's left.

Sorry about the blurriness.  BLUEBERRIES!

Tom cut the rose bush way back in the fall because it was really getting out of control.  Other than that, nothing has been done to it, and yet it keeps putting out flowers.

I got a LOT of seeds started last weekend, including: A second batch of all the tomatoes (Druzba, Money Maker, Black Giant, Jelly Bean), peppers (Golden Wonder, Banana, Mariachi), more squash, cucumbers, and okra. I also planted all the flower seeds we had which included poppy, sunflowers, nasturtium, and several packs of wild flowers.  I also restarted all the onion seeds because only two have come up.

Scenes from the rest of the garden:

A very small but growing basil plant.

Oregano.

Here is the possible casualty.  The leaves on one of the varieties of squash turned brown on the ends after the cold snap.  However, there were new leaves coming through the center of the plant that seemed OK.  Time will tell.

This is a different variety of squash, and it did just fine in the cold.

These look like parsnips, but they are indeed radishes.

I guess if it's bulging out of the ground, it's probably time to pick it, eh?  I pulled up the largest one and added it to our salads this week - it was delicious.

And speaking of salads, our butter crunch lettuce was large enough to finally make two salads.

This is the red sails and mesculin (OK seriously, how do you spell this word?) lettuce were planted several weeks after the butter crunch.  I totally see how great succession planting is.  By the time we've eaten all the butter crunch, this lettuce will be "online" and ready to eat.  Yeah succession planting!

Broccoli and cauliflower.

Very small something.

Okra and Olive.

Marjoram (I think).

Chard.  For dinner the other night I sauted some of these with garlic, a can of tomatoes, fresh parsley and tossed all of it with pasta - YUM.

Spinach - threw some of this in the salads.

Cucumbers (foreground) and parsley (background).

Beets.

Kale.

Carrots and a lot of weeds.

Cow peas (kind of struggling).

Snow peas. I finally broke down and tied them to the stakes since they wouldn't latch on by themselves.

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