Garden 2011

My garden is coming along nicely this year.

This is my pea bed. I haven't tried them before. The vines are pretty well loaded.

I had beans crawling up string in here last year.

Now I have horizontal lines running between the end poles to give the peas something to hang onto while keeping them off the ground. 

This is the first real mess of peas I picked.

I need to figure out the best time to pick them.

If the pods are too full the peas are tough.

Too small and the peas pop when you eat them and are sweet and tasty, but that isn't right either.

Chewy or sweet, there was enough to make dinner for FabHub and me.

I used wavy noodles and cooked up some pulled pork.

Then made a sauce and put the peas in it for a couple minutes before adding the noodles and pork in.

Very tasty.

I have another pile in the kitchen right now.

Dinner is going to be good!

Schnitzel (ok, it is beef, so really country fried steak with schnitzel coating), homemade spaetzel, and mushrooms with peas. Oh and a nice German Riesling Spatlese.

We are living the good life today!

The rest of the garden is doing fine.

If we could eat marigolds we would be doing awesome!

All those plants from last year left behind seeds - EVERYWHERE - in the beds and in the mulch between the beds. That is okay, they make a nice cover crop to keep the dirt from being completely exposed. I need to add some mulch to help with that though.

The butterflies are enjoying the marigolds too.

I don't know if this is a good butterfly or a bad one.

But it is pretty.

On the other end the scarecrow is keeping an eye on the corn and sunflowers.

I haven't grown either of them successfully in the past either.

I keep the rows covered in mowed grass mulch though and if I hadn't pulled some of the corn up as weeds, (hey corn is a grass and looks like grass, OK?), anyway, the corn would probably be thicker. 

Crows might have gotten some of it too. They ate up every bit of corn Nephew #1 planted up by the potato patch. Nobody was pulling weeds in those rows so it wasn't that, there wasn't any corn growing after two weeks. Something ate it.

That is the garden this year. Let's see what happens.

We are looking forward to some good homegrown dinners.