I had an idea to update on the status of the garden so I took my cell out onto the porch to head out to the garden spot. I dropped the phone. It went end over end and my quick hands (really) couldn’t save the phone. As soon as it thundered on the floor, I thought about how happy the better-half would be that I killed the phone. Ha! The rubber bumper I have on it saved the day and I’ll just wait until later this year to upgrade. The better-half will, undoubtedly, be sad that I didn’t drop it on concrete or into the pool. He hates both of our phones with the power of a thousand suns. I dislike my phone too and we are patiently waiting for the day we can upgrade. The Droids have been fine, but the things are old and thanks to Verizon not giving a crap about old technology they haven’t updated with any sort of frequency and so the software sucks. But, hey, you can drop it on a porch floor and then take crappy pictures. Bonus.
Well, the garden hasn’t failed spectacularly. At least not yet. Some crows picked our first two tomatoes and the bastards didn’t even finish eating them. I netted the tomatoes and hope that the recent rain, fertilizer and upcoming sunny days will do some botanical magic.
I’m not sure you can see the nets, but there are two around the five plants. The plants are healthy but they need to start producing.
Here’s the overgrown lettuce. We’ve been eating a lot of salad which makes me feel virtuous and very special. Walking to the garden to get food is freaking awesome. I’m sure the lettuce will be done in a few weeks because of the coming heat.
The herbs are beginning to really bust out. I made tabbouleh yesterday and used a mix of parsley, basil and mint (the mint bed is near the porch and is insane as most mint beds are):
This is the row of eggplants and peppers. The peppers are coming along nicely and we’ll be eating Fresnos in a couple of weeks. The eggplants have begun to bloom and with the coming heat I’m sure we’ll be eating a lot of eggplant. Too bad the better-half is not a fan. More for me.
Remember I told you that I thought the beans I transplanted out of the compost were going to be bush beans? Yeah, I lied. I drove in posts and strung up a trellis today. I used one of these things and, let me tell you, I’m pretty impressed that the exercises I’ve been doing for my shoulders and to strengthen my bum elbow have an additional benefit. Bad-assery with driving posts.
We’re having beans for dinner tonight. They were originally a bag of small red beans when they went into the compost. We’ll see how they taste green. I added two cucumbers to the row of beans and they are doing well. One is blooming like crazy and the other got the chat today. The chat of “you’d better start blooming or else I’ll continue to run you down on the internet”.
Black raspberries, heard of them? Smaller and more tart than the regular red raspberry. I kind of dig them:
The blackberries have gone nuts. I think they liked being trimmed because that just made them stronger and nearly as crazy as the mint bed. The good news is that I think we’ll have fruit for another month or so. We have some that are ripe, some that are still green and some that are still blooms. Booya!
Because I took a picture of Simon the last time I talked about the garden, here he is coming over for some love:
And, now the mystery squash. I have no idea what squash we ate over the winter and I tossed into the compost pile. Maybe acorn? I can’t wait to see what happens over the next few weeks:
