This pretty pink climbing rose has just started blooming in the front yard. I really like simple rose flowers like this one - it smells really good too!
The veggie garden is looking great! I had just watered in this picture, so the potatoes were a little flattened. Most of what you see on the right are garlic plants that we planted last fall (with a few red onions scattered in). Hopefully they'll be ready in a month or so.
In the course of watering the garden, I accidentally uncovered these baby potatoes! It was great timing, since we had eaten some of the very very last of the local russets from last fall just the night before. Potatoes are one of the only starches that are grown locally around here, and now we've proved that you can have them year round if you do it right! You really could survive quite nicely here all year on local potatoes, greens, dairy, meat, and fish. I boiled these and we ate them as a snack. The flavor of a potato right out of the ground is simply wonderful! I won't dig up the rest for a while, but it's good to know everything's growing well down there.
I bought some tomato seedlings at the farmer's market this Saturday - here's one of them. It's so cool here on the coast all summer that I don't have a lot of hope that they'll thrive, but I decided to give it a try anyway. One is a Sungold (gold cherry tomato) that I've grown with some success in the past. The other is an Early Girl - a regular red tomato variety. The farmers I bought them from seemed to think the Early Girl would do well on the coast, but I've been disappointed before.... It just doesn't get hot enough here for lots of tomatoes or basil, which is pretty sad since they're two of my very favorite summer foods.
The lettuce, on the other hand, is doing really well. This is red romaine ready to be eaten.
This sage plant sat on our porch in a big 10 gallon pot for a year and looked just horrible. I couldn't figure out why it just wasn't happy, so I planted it in the ground a moth ago or so and what do you know? It's blooming and looks as happy as a clam!
For a year and a half, since the fall of 2006, we've had a local blue Lumina pumpkin sitting on the front porch slowly decomposing. It was interesting to watch all the stages - by this spring it was reduced to a dried out pancake stuck to the porch. When I went to clean it up, I noticed how many seeds there were. On a whim, I planted some, and they came up! I've got 5 or 6 nice pumpkin seedlings!
share on: Facebook
Posts
