strawberries

In spite of the neglect (I have not fed, watered or mulched nearly enough), my strawberries are giving fruit.

I ate some this morning- small and few in number, but so good!

However as you might be able to tell from the first photo, something has been coming into the yard again, eating the strawberry leaves, and the tops off all the mayapples. I suspect the deer.

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.

plant swap!

This was great. Local gardener's plant swap was today. Here's what I took to give away: two young tomato plants, three pots of sorrel divisions, a half dozen coleus, one african violet, a small pot of miniature geranium cuttings, three pots of jade cuttings, 

a pot of tradescantia 'bolivianus', some rooted spider plant babies, one pot of cuban oregano cuttings.

And here's what I brought home! The obvious: another ostrich fern.

Two Lysimachia Lanceolata var purpurea. They have purplish leaves, and will bloom yellow.

Four strawberry plants

a sad-looking handful of lamb's ears

Salvia lyrata (I think I got this plant before from swap, don't think it survived, hope to do better)

Red Monarda 

And what makes me most happy: some young trees and shrubs! American Persimmon:

Two Spicebush:

One Pawpaw (!!) (I think- it wasn't labeled)

and seven little Redbuds (!!!)

chop

The Strawberries are done, so I've thinned them out a bit- yanked out some of the new little plants on runners that grew too close together- and cut them all down several inches. They always look really shabby when I do this, but recover quickly.

Fed very well with compost.

kids in the garden

My one-year-old loves to be outside; she will bring me her shoes, insist I put them on her feet, and then point out the window with eager exclamations (no clear words yet). She doesn't like it when I have to put her in the bouncy because the grass is wet with dew

she'd much rather be able to explore!

One of the main reasons I started gardening was because I wanted my kids to know that food grows on plants, not grocery store shelves. The baby knows this well already. She will point to the Pea plants and say "nguh!" her sound for I want to eat that! and if I give her pea pods split open she'll pick out the peas herself to eat them.

This morning she pulled Chard leaves off the plants, happily tore some up

and then munched on the ends of stalks like it was celery.

But most of all she loves the Strawberries. She knows where they grow and if left to her own devices will head over to the little strawberry patch and look for her own strawberries to eat. She eats as many unripe ones as red ones, so sometimes needs a little help picking!

The berries are almost done so it took quite some looking for my older daughter to find a ripe one.

red and green

The Strawberries are almost done in the garden. This morning picked just enough for breakfasting with cottage cheese.

Lettuce is all done, too. I've cut all the heads and stored in the fridge. There's plenty of garden space left though, where the garlics came out and beets failed to grow. Maybe I should be growing new batches of lettuce in succession.... Anyway, a few salads left but still no garden tomatoes! just mealy grocery-store ones.

pie!!

This is my first ever Rhubarb-Strawberry pie all from the garden. Picked so many Strawberries we all had some for breakfast, then I sorted the rest and cut some up for pie

with this bowl overflowing for fresh eating.

Here's the Rubarb older daughter helped me pick. The stems are kinda skinny, so I took one fat one off a plant that already got enough picked for the season...

Here's the pie shell filled and ready to have the top crust put on.

Oooh, it was so good! as you can see we ate most of it before I got a chance to photo the finished product.

red and green

I have been busy and forgetting to post
but we are beginning to pick lots of fat, juicy Strawberries from the garden,

and also my first gathering of Peas! They were sweet.

While I sat and shelled the peas, the baby got to eat all the bitty ones that weren't decent size. She loved them!

beginnings

I have little green Strawberries forming!

tiny flowers

My Strawberry plants are blooming!

a walk

through the yard just to see how things are doing

My Garlic bed looks marvellous!

The Strawberries are getting lush.

Turnips are getting their first true leaves; I need to do a bit more thinning here. Carrots nearby are coming up little green threads too small to get a good photo easily.

A few Hosta are emerging in the front beds among the tulips. (I haven't weeded here- yikes!)

The Mints are flourishing (of course) after their move.

freezing

I should have listened to A. He reminded me that february is always our coldest month. But I was beguiled by the springlike weather and started planting anyways. A few nights ago we had a hard frost, then a drifting of snow, and tonight the wind is blasting shrieks around the house. My garlics are well-tucked in with an extra layer of leaf mulch, and the rhubarb still covered with glass cloches and leaves, but I was rash and uncovered the Strawberry patch.

I do hope they survive.