End of Summer Blossoms: Vegetable Edition

When we planted the peas seven weeks ago, we put in one trellis-length (12-ish feet) of regular peas and one trellis-length of snap peas. We figured this would let us snack on the snap peas while we waited for the regular peas to come in for harvests aimed at preparing or preserving for meals.

Well, that didn't work. The regular peas blossomed about three weeks ago and are still going strong:


These guys are about as tall as I am as they make their way up the trellis, and we've got a bunch of pods ready to go:


The snap peas, though … oy. Hurricane rain and cooler temps have helped out everything else, and those stubborn bastards still didn't blossom. This weekend marks 7 weeks since we planted them, and...


Finally! And look how gorgeous it is!  I wasn't expecting purple at all. Usually our pea blossoms are white, maybe tinged pink. But these were definitely worth the wait. I'm so excited about it, I'm posting an extra photo:


We've got lots of them now, and hopefully the pods will come in and taste as good as they look. The second trellis-length was planted as week later, so this time next week our garden should be filled with a nice violet screen for fall.

Meanwhile, we've got other flowers going on in veggieland:


These blossoms are on our Blue Lake bush beans. They have enormous leaves now--much bigger plants than we managed in our old garden. They also have many more of the creamy flowers, which will hopefully translate into a big old pile of beans. We're also hoping it warms up again for a stretch to help them out.


These flowers are on our mint. I should probably pinch them off, but we have a ton of mint, and they're pretty. They can stay for a bit until I make the rounds of weeding, fertilizing, and thinning again. I saw an actual honeybee today, and if I notice they like the mint flowers, then those flowers can stay until frost.

We almost have a few lavender blossoms also, but right now they are just buds. If they open before frost, that will be a bonus, since I only put them in in the middle of summer and wasn't expecting anything out of them this season.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more