a little garden bounty

My wife may be a “master gardener” but we have a lot of room for improvement and learning in the gardening department. It’s our second year gardening in this yard, and our first year in our community garden plot, and we’ve learned a lot. While I may not be as obsessively photographing everything we eat, our big win is in eating nearly everything we’ve grown. Sometimes that seems like half the battle. Here’s a small taste of what we’ve been harvesting from the yard lately:

Everytime I look at fresh peas from our garden I hear Gordon Ramsay saying (in his nicer Master Chef voice), “THE MOST AMAZING FRESH PEAS!”

I’m pretty sure Ramsay would agree with me that those Chioggia beets are stunning.

Maestro Peas

For all the disappointment this summer has held for the gardeners of the Pacific Northwest, with our record-breaking cold temperatures, buckets of rain, and nights that are still less than 50 degrees as we near August, it has been a stellar summer for the cold season crops – brassicas, radishes, lettuces, peas. These are shelling peas directly from the pod. They are about as sweet as candy and they come in their own little wrapper. They never make it to the kitchen, so I don’t have a single recipe for them.

rain, rain go away

Not to complain or anything, but I think we could use a sunny streak here in Olympia, WA. It has been a less than stellar spring for Pacific Northwest gardeners. The biggest problem I’m facing is being behind on building the last of our beds due mostly to rain, rain, and more rain. At least our brassicas are going to town. Check out our broccoli:

And I scored some cheap vintage gnomes to try to cheer up our yard.

Our peas have blossoms!

Our bees have been hiding out a lot due to the cold, but at least when they come out they can find the borage we planted for them is ready.

Really this is supposed to be a post about something other than bees, but these bumble bees are all over our yard and they are adorable.

In this mostly non-food corner of our yard, I love the mix of different shades of green. There is some chocolate mint in there for good measure (and do you need any, by the way? or do you want to come over for mojitos?), but a couple of my favorites are covering the ground. My childhood nostalgia for lambs ear is being fulfilled, as is my love of succulents.

These bright lime green guys are probably the one plant our yard came with that I truly love.

xo Krista

I’ve done it this time

I planted two pea patches in the backyard before we went on vacation. One is shelling peas, one is snow peas. Of course, I was in a hurry and I didn’t write myself a note or make plant markers. Now I have no idea which is which. But they’ve sprouted!