garden update

I thought maybe it was time for a GARDEN UPDATE.

Things have um, been going well, as you can see :-)

Radishes are a big winner, they mature in 20-30 days so we've already eaten all of them and planted more. The snow peas also matured and we ate pretty much all of them. It got to the point I went out there every day and picked a dozen. That was fun and I was getting used to it. Now they're all gone, sigh. I wonder if more will come in? The strawberries were June-bearing so they're done, too. In fact, several of my strawberry plants are now "running," which is a fancy thing where they are like, wanting to spread to other parts of the garden, and I'm desperate to plant them IN THE GROUND instead of pots. It feels cool to invest in the future, so to speak, with these little plants. I just need to commit to a spot.

Our slow growers are green beans.... taking forever but we are getting some on the plant now, getting bigger. Green onions also take forever. Sheesh, like 120 days to maturity. So they're chugging along.

The garden bully is zucchini. We've harvest a couple zucchinis so far which has been fun, and now on one of the plants I counted SEVEN growing. The leaves for that plant are just so darn big.

Our disappointments so far:

• Pea pods -- they just kinda shriveled and half died but we got some. And we're still getting some, oddly. They didn't grow up on the lattice nearly as well as the snow peas did. 
• Lettuce -- I don't know why. It's only supposed to take about a month to mature, but we have teensy leaves and it's not that fancy. Maybe the bully zucchini plant is covering the leaves so they're not growing?
• Raspberries -- I put our starts in a planter pot and forgot to unplug the stopper on the bottom, so they drowned I think. I hear they are rather hearty (they're invasive after all), so all I need to to is find a spot in the ground for them and they'll come back, too. But nothing this year. 
• Cherries -- Our poor cherry trees. The crows ate all the cherries. Literally I ate one, and Laurel had maybe four. All the rest either fell off and rotted or the crows ate them. There are NONE left on the tree. So strange. Last year I had enough for a fancy slab pie and this year, nothing. If the crows go after my plums I will buy a shotgun.

The remaining unknown is carrots. They're still growing. Nothing to report there.

Here are some of our harvests. The carrots I pulled waaaay too early but I just wanted to see! Everything has been great. Laurel ate the strawberries as soon as they were even remotely red. She also wants the snow peas right off the vine. That girl will eat anything. 

"The gift that keeps on giving" award goes to the soil in general, which has produced all sorts of wild mystery plants that I've identified one by one. The first mystery plant is in fact edible -- red potatoes! I've got a bunch of them growing now. Pretty cool. It took some detective work to figure out what they were, and in fact I pulled several of them, but the big one I left and it's producing real food. I also have had a decent amount of mystery weeds that I let grow, wondering if they were something special, when in fact they were weeds. A couple google searches of "Pacific Northwest weeds" burst that bubble. I currently have two I am trying to identify, I can't bring myself to pull them until I know what they are, although I'm certain they've got to be weeds. 

Well, that's my report. I'm actually keeping a "garden journal" which is cool and documenting this summer's growing exploits.