3rd week of June 2010

Picking Sugar Snap Peas The garden harvest is moving beyond just green salad fixings and now we are picking peas, zucchini, yellow squash, sweet onions, herbs and the first cabbage should be ready next week. In the pea realm, I have sugar snap peas, snow peas plus shelling peas. The sugar snaps are growing on a trellis and some of them are even taller than I am. With their height on the four foot trellis some are starting to flop over and I am tying them back up with twine. Lots of peas will be going into veggie baskets in the coming weeks plus I will be making stir fry bags for the Local Roots Market that combine snow peas, baby zucchini, sweet onion, garlic scapes and lemon basil. We enjoyed our first zucchini and snow peas in a stir fry tonight and it was quite tasty. It is easy to get caught up in harvesting and weeding right now but I still need to keep succession plantings in mind. Another couple bean rows need planted plus more beets (the first bed was overtaken by weeds...) and another round of zinnias to keep nice blooms going into late summer.

Pitting Sour Cherries Another delightful harvest happening right now is the cherries. We have four mature sweet cherry trees plus a couple sour cherry trees. The kids go out to eat breakfast in the tree, take multiple snack breaks and finish the day with even more cherries. What a pleasure to have such treats in our backyard! We are picking as many as we can reach and with the help of this nifty cherry pitter they are quickly ready for the freezer for winter treats. Our season starts with a semi-sweet red cherry, next are the dark purple cherries, we are working on the yellows now and a late red cherry will end the season. We usually can have several days of good picking on each tree before the birds dive in and finish off the rest. I do enjoy watching the Baltimore Orioles taking a cherry snack now and then. The pair has a basket nest hanging precariously in a black walnut tree near our house.

Hay Fort We just picked up a load of junk hay to use for garden mulch. Before it turns into mulch though, the children are having fun making hay bale castles, mazes and forts. Every once in a while I call for another bale in the garden and they rearrange their structure. Two of the boys even had a camp out in their hay house one night. The garden rows look so nice with hay down and I am pleased how well our weeding and mulching is coming along. With the exception of a few ugly corners and a neglected flower bed, the garden is looking quite respectable. The pleasant evenings are my favorite time to weed and I love staying out till dusk. I am also working on getting the tomatoes trellised and should have that done by next week. I remember some years trying to finish the tomato job in July and what a mess it is lifting up gangly and tangled vines. As I trellis, I'm pruning the tomato vines by pinching off suckers. This is supposed to increase the size of the fruit and give a better overall harvest. I know some diehards will continue to pinch suckers every week but I usually only get at it once and hope it helps. We'll keep watching for the first sign of color on the early tomatoes, hopefully next week I can report on our first real taste of summer.