Spring Veggies
We had our first feed of beans last night. Haricots verts, I suppose if you want to be fancy, but they tasted like green beans to me.
The sweet peas on the fence behind the beans are finally beginning to flower as they should. After a month of boring pink and white, other varieties are finally in flower. I never realized what a gap there could be between flowering times. They were all planted together in January.
The bean tepee is constructed, for the first time, of home grown bamboo. We once lived in a house with invasive bamboo along the back fence, which worried me because it was starting to stray into the neighbor’s garden. Round-Up merely made it fork. Then I read about a Maryland man who was suing his neighbor over invasive bamboo. Shortly after that, we moved.
This bamboo comes from Connie’s house, and I have known it for 20 years. In that time, it has spread hardly at all, so I thought it was safe to take a clump. So far, so good.
The veg garden hasn’t changed much since I moved it to the east side of the garden about 3 years ago. (I’ve moved the lilies out of it.) I now realize I need more space. This summer, I have beans, potatoes, various tomatoes, and the pimientos. There isn’t nearly enough space between things. It makes picking the beans very awkward. I’m not sure where to expand to. I suppose for the moment, I’ll just gain a foot or two on the south and east sides.
Here are the pimientos de Padron. I was afraid I’d lost them since I didn’t plant them last year, and they are always balky about germinating, but here they are.
For 2 years, I have been using newspaper and pine straw mulch, but I’m now switching to composted wood chips from the county dump. It’s a wonderful mulch and it’s free, but I still haven’t figured out the ideal way of getting it from mulch pile into pickup. I’m sure a hay fork would be better than the shovel I’ve been using, but I feel there should be something better. I keep hoping I’ll be at the dump when the guy with the frontloader is turning the pile, so that he can just give me a scoop, but so far that hasn’t happened.
On a completely different topic, I am strongly tempted to remove from my blogroll all those blogs that have horrid little comment boxes and catchcas, or whatever they’re called. They are so irritating to use and so completely unnecessary. I’ve never had a spam comment sneak through in 6 years of blogging.
