Friday, May 30, 2014

Garden update

IMG_0368 May is coming to an end…sad for me because May is always my favorite time in the garden, things are always looking so fresh and promising after a little rain and warmth hits the soil.  This year we built our raised beds up with deeper and stronger boards and added lots of compost rich soil which is producing plants with good strong stems and deep green leaves.  One of my favorite things to come out of my garden this May was all the lettuce, beet greens, beets, peas and kohlrabi.  It has made for some great tasting salads every night and I do feel healthier for it.  Oh, how I have loved those varied colors of tasty lettuce, but now they are beginning to bolt and go bitter from the heat so they will soon be pulled and replaced  with something undecided as of yet.

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June should be a month when we can start to reap the benefits of our love and labor in the garden.  The strawberries are starting to produce tasty fruits along with a few of the raspberries.  The first crop of figs are ripening as I write this.  I am seeing baby squash on the squash plants and I even spotted a few green tomatoes on the vines.

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Some Facebook friends started posting pictures of their beautiful poppies so we had a lot of fun bombing Facebook with our flower pictures every day.  Mine is a Zahir poppy which I grew from seeds from Redwood seeds, a local seed company.  I am anxiously waiting for the seed heads to turn brown and dry so that I can harvest the edible seeds inside.  I always have a jar of fresh poppy seeds for baking.

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I am trying my hand at growing Quinoa this year.  It is a grain that I am learning to enjoy cooking and eating.  Watching this crop grow I can see that I really didn’t plant enough.  If I enjoy it I will be changing that for next year.  Several people have told me that it is a lot of work to harvest so we’ll see how I feel about it after harvest time.  It has been real interesting to watch it grow though.

 I am hoping that others are experiencing the joy of growing their own food and from the looks of our vegetable and fruit tree sales at the nursery I can safely say that there are many that are trying their hand at it.  I don’t think there has been a day this season that someone has not said to me that this is their first time to try growing a food crop.  I hope that they all have a good experience and will keep at it for many years to come.IMG_0370

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