Karen's Garden Delights Journal
3rd week of June 2011

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This little fellow was cutely munching on clover beside my garden in this photo but earlier got into big trouble by nibbling a dozen or so new little broccoli plants. Rabbits have been brutal on my garden this season but I thought at this point they had enough other field goodies to keep them occupied that they wouldn't notice some prime tender new cole crops in the middle of my garden - I was wrong. The cabbage and broccoli seedlings are now surrounded with a chicken wire fence and he will have to be content with clover for a while. I have another batch of cabbage, brussel sprouts and broccoli in flats that will be ready to go in the ground in a couple weeks and we'll have to put them in an area where we can fence them also. The resident groundhog has a hole near the garlic patch and thankfully there is no evidence that he is developing a taste for spicy food.

The children made the last major harvest of garlic scapes and we are trying to figure out ways to use up the eight bags they gathered. Besides selling them, bartering them and sending samples home with any garden visitors, we are chopping them up for the freezer, making dilly scapes and we tried a batch of garlic pesto for the freezer. They are a tasty food but they do come faster than we can use them. The peas are starting to produce and I'm hoping this mild 70 degree weather hangs on a while longer so we can get a decent pea harvest before the heat arrives. They were planted much later than normal due to the the wet spring weather but they are one of our family and customer favorites. We are eating more little tomatoes and maybe next week a few will make it into the veggie baskets if I can keep the kids away from the plants for a few days. Zucchini and yellow squash were new this week and I'm watching a few tiny green beans start to develop. Little cucumbers are also starting to form as well as the fava beans which I'll need to start looking up recipes for. Beets will be on the menu this week but what I'm really craving are new potatoes. Our winter supply ran out months ago and I am really missing cooking with potatoes. We may start grappling for a meal or two to satisfy us till we can start digging.

The focus for the weekend was a wedding flower order that included 100 blue mason jars full of wildflowers, 4 bouquets in crocks and garnishes for the fruit tray. I picked flowers from our garden, raided the yards of 5 friends with a bucket and scissors plus ordered 6 buckets of flowers from my Amish flower growing friend Nettie - it takes a lot of flowers to fill that many jars! The drizzly rain made picking a bit challenging but I was grateful we didn't get the hard, driving rain that I drove through near Orrville on Thursday. Once all the buckets were gathered, I enlisted Nettie's daughters to help arrange the bouquets and it took us over 5 hours to complete the order. Thankfully the weather was cool enough I didn't need to find air-conditioning for storing them overnight. Saturday morning we helped set them up on the reception tables under a tent at Camp Luz and it truly looked a bit like a garden in there. After some rest, I'll need to gear up for another wedding next weekend.