spring

makes me antsy to get out and do things, build. Forsythia is blooming, time to plant out lettuce but I don't have any seedlings ready. I need to trim the eunoymus, turn the compost pile, clear old leaf litter and replace mulch on the perennial beds, reset some bricks that edge the garden beds where they're leaning wonky, etc. I just don't have the energy yet. I went out yesterday and cleared weeds from one garden bed again, and that wore me out. 

It was the long bed #1, which had chard and strawberries last year (that never fruited). The weeds are so thick in all the garden beds because I didn't mulch properly in the fall. You can tell by how bare the ground is, now that I've pulled out the dead nettle and other stuff. It was nice to see a few bees out foraging on the nettle flowers on a warm day, but I still don't want the stuff all over my garden anymore. Here's the bared strawberry plants. They've spread, but the older plants I originally put in, aren't much bigger than the new plants. And I don't know if any will bear, as I didn't feed them in fall.

A few of the previous years' leaf beet chard rootstock sprouted new leaves. (You can see how far the strawberry runners spread- they weren't planted this close to the rows of chard!)

I cut all those baby leaves off, plus those from one likewise newly-spouted old collard plant in bed 8 with the catmint (it's very small)

and used them in a dish with the cowpeas. Finally I have cooked my cowpeas! I though it odd that after soaking, only some of them had doubled in size. Forgot to take a picture of the final dish. I found (of course) conflicting info online how to cook black-eyed peas: soak or not. I went with a two-hour soak before cooking and don't think it was enough. Had to simmer them longer than the recipe said and they just got barely tender, not creamy. Basically the recipe was: sauté onion, garlic and a bit of minced celery, simmer with the cowpeas in chicken broth and water, add bay leaf and some spices- the main one was thyme which I didn't have so I used summer savory. 

It was not really a hit. It was okay, but nobody really liked it. And the fact that two years' worth of saved dried cowpeas only got me one small meal (I had to cut the recipe in half), was beyond pathetic. My husband said "you were successful! We're eating it!" but I cringed inside.

I do appreciate how lush the cowpeas grew (pic from last season below), and how little they were bothered by pests and disease in my garden- but they just didn't give me enough output. True there'd be more dried peas if I hadn't eaten so much as fresh green beans, but I still think it would have just made a handful of meals, is all.

Well, I'll have to re-evaluate that. In another part of the backyard, my rhubarb is emerging! I really would like to make pie with my own rhubarb and my own strawberries again, but I probably will have to settle for just half of that being home-grown this year.

More pics to come.