What's Growing on Hen and Drake Farm - Week 24

Every morning I take a stroll through the gardens. I check the plants for pests (squishing cabbage butterfly caterpillars is soo satisfying) and disease, decide which plants need a dose of fertilizer and which beds to weed that day. All the while looking for opportunities to take interesting or pretty pictures. 

After lunch I visit the gardens again, applying fertilizer and copper fungicide, as needed, pulling weeds and snapping more pictures.

In the evening, when the sun dips behind the trees and the garden is shaded, I sit at my bistro table and absorb the garden's scents, sounds and textures.

By taking care of the garden I regain the strength to cope with an increasingly scary and disappointing world. The garden is a balm to an often painfully tense body, and a mind frequently agitated. Just walking through the garden gate quiets my mind, releases the tense pinch between my shoulders and unties the knot in my stomach that seems ever present 

Here is the garden this week

My sweet peas have started to bloom

The celery has been enjoying the cooler, wetter weather we've been having

My hard neck garlic is putting out scapes

 

I love looking at this bed with all the different plants growing in it. Sunflowers, peas, corn, beets and squash (and a lovely crop of weeds)

Sunflower heart

Fruit has begun to set on most of my large tomato varieties. This is Rose

Fortex bean tendril searching for a place to climb

These Pontiac Red and German Butterball potatoes remind me of infants attached by their umbilical cords to the mother plant

A bumblebee hovering near one of my comfrey plants

Himalayan blackberry blossom

Shiro plums

Frost peach

Loads of sweet cherries

Silken apples

Fresh garden salad with blue cheese, candied pecans and a raspberry vinaigrette

Weekly harvest total:

1 pound peas, radishes and green onions

14 ounces mixed greens

6 ounces kale

Yearly total:

5 pounds 2 ounces