Anticipation Is a New Vegetable

Having never grown Kohlrabi before, I have been carefully watching its habits. 9 to a square for the square foot method seems to be adequate so far. And can you see it, there among the leaves?


The beginnings of a bulb of Kohlrabi!

I have no idea what it will taste like or how much longer before I'll be able to find out, but it is eating me up with anticipation (no pun intended). What a strange little alien looking plant.

Magic Peas

Planted on St. Patrick's day, I've been impatient for peas. in the past few days I have been rewarded with lovely white flowers that look like ladies in white bonnets glancing shyly over their shoulders. I can just imagine how pleased they must be to see a gentleman bee come a courtin'.

In the evening, when the light hits a pea pod in just the right way, it glows. I shall always think of peas as being magic because of this beautiful trick of the light.

Square Foot Salad

Salad lettuces, spinach interspersed, chard, kale, collards, peas, carrots, kohlrabi (never tried this before, I'm SO excited!), nasturtiums, a few beets, even some red cups full of slug bait! My favorite is a mixed green salad fresh from this bed with a little vinegar and olive oil, it just tastes like spring.

Cool season crops seem to grow so fast, this is only a week later!

Kohlrabi, Ruby Chard and Spinach

Tasty Lettuces and Nasturtiums

Frugal Cutworm Collars

You loving raise plants from seed. Or you buy them at a healthy stage from a nursery and bring them home and lovingly plant them. Either way, they are your little vegetative babies. So imagine your surprise when one morning you go out to survey your growing yummy goodness and you see one of your little darlings cut down! Chomped down is more like it. Cutworms are nasty little buggers that seem to delight in cutting down healthy little seedlings before their stems are thick and strong. They delight in making a meal not out of the leaves and flowers, just the stem. Just cutting down the whole plant. If you find such damage in your garden, pull away the first half inch or so of mulch and dirt in a 3 to 6 inch radius around your casualty. You'll probably find the culprit, snoozing off his stem feast. Squash him, otherwise you'll have another casualty the next morning.

To combat cutworms before they start their lumberjack ways, I use cutworm collars. Some folks like to use yogurt cups and cut the bottoms off to make a ring of plastic protection around the plants, others buy the fancy ones from garden supply stores. I've had good luck so far with something a little more prevalent and a little more lazy. I present the humble toilet paper roll.


I know what you're thinking: it looks awfully ghetto. However, I don't have to cut the bottom off of anything, I simply gently ease the roll around the seedling and press it into the soil about an inch. The beauty in my mind is that the rolls can be composted once they've served their cutworm protecting purpose. And I figure I KNOW I'll use, er, the other stuff that comes on a roll, so after saving them up all winter long, I have an abundant supply.

Raised Beds Revealed!

Ba bu bu BUM!!!! All of my cowboy's hard work is now planted!
Aren't they lovely?


The wood ones are last season's handiwork. The Trex ones are this season's addition to our garden space. All finished, filled with topsoil, mulched, planted, and trellised. He is such a dear, the only parts I had to be responsible for were the mulching and planting. We put up the U-posts and netting together, which made the whole process go much more smoothly.

Wildflower Alley

Wildflower Alley Update from this past week.

Daisy's and Wallflower (at least I'm pretty sure that the orange is wallflower)


Blue Flax is the feathery blue in the foreground. Can you imagine that in ancient times people made linen out of that? I sincerely hope it grows larger in Mesopotamia! The pink and red are (I think) Sweet William.


Dame's Rocket is just stunning, especially with the orange wallflowers underneath. I secretly love it when folks drive around the corner and slow down to see these flowers.

I've actually had a love affair with Dame's Rocket for a few years and never knew it. This lovely showy flower grows wild next to a creek along my drive to work. Every spring for the past 3 years, I've driven by them and thought "one of these days I should figure out what those are so I can plant them in my garden." I was absolutely thrilled when they started shooting up this spring!

Bean Monsters

These little guys are so much fun. One day you've got a nice, quiet bed of mulch.
The next, you've got little mounds of mulch that looks like small underground monsters pushing up from the depths.

And then you've got beans!

If you're away for more than a few days, you miss all the action. I love how violently they emerge from the earth. Break free, little beans, break free!