Garden Talk

 Rick and Jasper have been rather busy over the past few months.  As work and school allowed they dug and hauled buckets of rocks and desert soil and dug some more.  They sawed and nailed and built new beds for the garden expansion, and though barely half complete, we are moving in.  The photo above is taken from the "lower garden", looking up toward the chicken coops in the background.  Basically where those colorful pots are now, used to be a fence--the end of the old vegetable garden we built up and worked in for 12 years.  Now we have double the space, lots more sunlight, and a giddy feeling of "possibilities".

We use raised beds and intensive planting.  So this bed above has radishes and turnips in front, lemon cucumbers just planted in front of trellis, and broccoli behind.  The next bed to the left has lettuce, baby bok choy and turnips, lemon cucumbers and leeks.  The last bed at top left has bush beans.  Warm weather crops will grow slowly over the next month or so, as our nighttime temperatures will creep from mid-thirties now, to mid fifties by early July--there's not alot of growing that takes place at night with those temps.  We are constantly reminded that a vegetable garden at this altitude and latitude and in the rain-shadow of the Cascade mountains, is a bit of a miracle!  It seems like a lot, but we are a family of seven and the garden produces enough for fresh eating with maybe a bit for freezing or cool storage of

If we took a poll of the younger Gerhardts, I would guess their favorite homegrown vegetable to be peas. The plump shelling kind that you score your fingernail down the middle, open up and pop in your mouth are the best, but sugar snap pods never go to waste either--and neither variety makes it indoors to grace a bowl or stirfry. All eaten fresh right where they're picked. Jasper built this new peatrellis to support these shell peas. On the left is a row of lettuce seedlings just popping up, and in the middle, between pea rows, a row of spinach which will love the shade when the peas are fuller.

This photo also makes it obvious that there is a smudge on Willow's lens.  We'll have to look into that....

And here is Willow's dog, Lanie, telling us that all work in the garden, and no play, make for a boring Jasper, Rick and Dawn.  We can't have that, can we?