Choose your words wisely; they hold the power to craft your reality.
I haven’t seen an aphid, a slug or a snail, the notorious arch-enemies of spinach, but someone’s been eating my spinach…
That’s ok, because the lettuce is so soft and sweet I’m fine to let the mysterious muncher have the majority of the spinach.
The pumpkins are promising —
A self planted carrot —
Cucumbers
Potatoes
Yellow Watermelon
Butternut squash
Super sweet sugar snaps
Hearty looking strawberries —
Sneaking off the couch and hobbling into the back yard I was rewarded with our very first spring salad —
And then over to the north garden to see how the rhubarb was behaving–
He may have been waving it in the air like he just didn’t care, but I paid him no mind and got right to business. Harvesting time.
The leaves are mildly toxic, and I can’t go near them without gloves or I’ll break out in a rash, but it doesn’t bother the girls one bit. They are of tougher stock.
Even a child can harvest rhubarb. All you do is grasp the stalk, pretty close to the ground, and wiggle it. It will release from the plant with this little slipper attached–
Stalks are ready when they are thick enough (about the diameter of a dime or thicker.) They will range in color from deep pink to light speckled green.
I dice them and freeze them for recipes like my favorite crisp. Inside the color also ranges from a whitish pink to a light green–
Also reporting in: the raspberries have millions of tiny buds, and the strawberries, recently thinned, are sporting tons of flowers.
It’s hard to tiptoe on the tulips when they are slick with snow–
Snow, shmoe, I won’t let it get me down. The weather changes so fast around here that you might not even notice something very fishy going on in the rhubarb patch. What, exactly, is this?
I’ve had this rhubarb for seven summers now and this is the first time I’ve seen it get so, er, excited. Email me stat if you’ve got a reasonable explanation.
With Dave up on the roof battling his nemesis, and me here on the ground with a broken foot and looming cold nights, there was little I could manage in the garden. Still, Mother’s Day means I get my way (kind of) and my request was simple–just pick all the dang dandelions. I know it’s short-sighted but I don’t want to look at them and I’m the mother and it’s my day so just get rid of the things, okay?
And so it was.
And the mother was pleased as she watched the children pick the “wild flowers” and construct a chain of them which they looped round the au natural trellis and they all lived happily ever after.
On to the mundane. I hobbled to and fro to photograph the progress being made between the snowflakes.
The spinach is coming along nicely,
As is the lettuce, which had been written off but is proving tougher than 28 degree nights–
Our itty bitty peach tree even has a couple of promising blossoms–
Mother’s Day had us planting, hesitantly. We’re going to wait a few more weeks for some warmer nights before planting the more fragile stuff, but put in another round of carrots, onions and chard today.
There is a chance, I suppose, that since I’ve deserted it our sweet little garden has runneth over, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m visiting my mother, and she has shown me how a real garden behaves. It’s not that my cute little berry patch back in Colorado isn’t special; it is. But next to this macho New York garden with its prime beach-front location and vines reaching for the stars, mine seems a bit underwhelming.
Look closely. Can you find my girls? That’s them being consumed by greenery as they munch their way through grandma’s garden. My what big spinach you’ve got granny…now how about you get it to spit out the children?
It’s not just the size of her prolific garden, or the fact that it’s situated on a piece of real estate that makes broccoli everywhere envious. Something about those leafy greens put a spell on our children. It was all we could do to tear the six cousins out of the garden and convince them to jump in the bay. The beach? Maybe later; hey, who wants more salad?
The snap peas are sweet and crisp, a favorite along with the cucumbers. But surprisingly, these kids can’t keep their picking fingers off the fennel (they call it licorice, and save it for “salad dessert.”) They also chomp with glee through the spinach and chard. Ok, so for those keeping score, it’s North Carolina for earth-friendly, grass-fed protein, and New York for getting kids and their vegetables together in harmony.
Cousin Emily adored the mint leaves. And I think Evan owes his Spider Man powers to the hundreds of blades of lemon grass he chewed.
My mother remains modest about her remarkable gardening success. She suggests only that we place lo-jacks on the children to allow us to pull them to safety when it’s time to give them their ice cream.
You do remember ice cream, don’t you kids?