6/20 Harvest - Not so Grand Debut of Turnip Greens

We spent a large part of this weekend building our tomato trellis structure with 10-foot electrical conduits, and spent half that time waiting for the rain and lightning to pass so we could actually work outside.  It took a lot of time, effort and muscles (more Keith's than mine), but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll post some pictures of it later this week, but for now, it's Harvest Monday time!

 

Our cayenne pepper plant that we overwintered indoors last winter is still growing happily indoors.  It's basically a self-sufficient houseplant at this point and it continues to produce a few peppers every month or so.  Since I actually remembered to harvest them this weekend, I even took a few green ones.

Swiss chard, Red Russian kale, and one red onion harvested as green onion

Mammoth Melting snow peas.  These and sugar snap peas have been my favorite spring vegetables so far.  They are super delicious just lightly stir-fried.  For Sunday lunch, I put them in the same cast iron griddle with some mahi mahi filets, and they cooked up beautifully on the hot griddle without even stirring.  Unfortunately, the pea vines are looking even worse now than they did last week.  I'm afraid they won't last much longer in the heat.

This is our first year growing and tasting turnip, and quite possibly our last year.  Since the roots are still very small, there wasn't much to eat of them, but I steamed the green tops after finding out that they are edible.  Well, "edible" may be a subjective term, because Keith made the most pathetic "I'm never eating this again" face.  I didn't think it tasted good, but it also wasn't all that bad. Okay, maybe medium-bad.  But it's probably not something that I would choose to buy to cook for myself.  So it goes into the category of "I'm only eating this because I grew it."

Sadly, our lettuce is starting to get bitter.  I harvested some Prizehead, Red Romaine, and Quattro Stagioni (seeds shared by Robin).  Although he rejected the turnip greens, Keith did eat two large salads made with this semi-bitter lettuce, so all was not lost with the harvesting of greens this weekend.

• Lettuce Mix 13.0 oz
• Swiss Chard 6.5 oz
• Red Russian Kale 1.5 oz
• Turnips 9.0 oz
• Green Onions 1.6 oz
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 5.1 oz
• Hot Peppers 0.65 oz
• Weekly Total 37.35 oz, or 2.34 lbs
• 2011 Total 9.37 lbs

6/13 Harvest - Greens and Peas

It's been almost a week since our return back home, and I'm still not as organized as I would like to be in the garden, at home and with married life in general.  This last name changing business is even more tedious than I had thought!  And going back to work this week means going back to my weekly commute to Texas, which means even less time at home to get things done.  But I couldn't miss yet another Harvest Monday, so here are some pictures of our harvest from last week. 

This was Sunday's harvest, consisting of a bowlful of china choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), some green onions, a handful of sugar snap and snow peas (some seeds shared by Prairie Cat), and some red romaine lettuce.

Here's a closeup of one of the red romaine lettuce leaves.  It's not quite as productive as some of the other lettuces in the garden, and it doesn't seem to tolerate heat very well, but I do like it for the color variety it adds to the sea of greens in the garden at the moment.

This was my first sizable pea harvest (both sugar snap peas and snow peas) this season, harvested last Tuesday evening.  I had such a hard time growing peas last year, both in the spring and fall, so I'm really glad to have better luck with peas this spring.  Finally, I can harvest fresh peas right off the vines and enjoy them raw or stir-fried just minutes later in the kitchen.  I was amazed that most of these pea vines survived the brutal heat wave over the last few weeks.  I'm not sure how much longer they will survive, though, as the lower half of most of the vines are starting to look brown and dry.  But I will certainly keep enjoying these homegrown peas for as long as they last.

 

I also harvested some chard - Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard and Ruby Red Chard.  The red ones are growing much slower than the white ones, and both will probably grow bigger with time, but I was impatient and wanted to try some last week.  I'm glad I harvested some of these young chard, because they made for a very tasty wilted chard salad!

I have a lot of onions growing in the garden and I harvest some as green onions whenever I want to use them for cooking.  It's little conveniences like this that keeps me gardening!  This year, I planted red, white and yellow onions, and I think the red ones look so pretty harvested as green onions.  I know that if I just snip these off above ground and leave the roots in the soil, they will probably sprout more green onions, but I really like seeing the red part and there are plenty more still growing in the garden, so I harvest most of these red ones whole.  Ahh, little luxuries.

I also snipped some flat leaf parsley to toss in salads and pasta.  These were grown from seeds saved from last year's parsley.  The cilantro that I planted in spring have all bolted during our long absence, but parsley seems to be holding up okay.  Like green onions, I really like being able to snip a bit of parsley here and there as needed, instead of having to buy a big bundle from the grocery store and feeling rushed to use them all before they wilt in the fridge.

One of several new vegetables for me this year is mizuna.  According to the seed packet, they are supposed to grow up to 12 inches tall, but I harvested my first batch at maybe half that size just to try out the flavor.  But things don't always go as planned, and these are still sitting in the fridge because we've just had too much greens to eat this week, and I figured these will probably last longer than lettuce in the fridge. 

Finally, here is another harvest picture from sometime last week.  I harvested a colander full of lettuce, another full of swiss chard, sugar snap peas, snow peas, turnip greens, and a bit more mizuna.  This might just be the largest single day harvest we've had yet from our garden!

I probably missed a few harvest pictures, but all in all, we harvested the following from the garden last week:

• Lettuce Mix 1.38 lbs
• Swiss Chard 0.32 lbs
• Asian Greens 2.39 lbs
• Turnips 0.22 lbs
• Radish 1.0 oz
• Green Onions 0.67 lbs
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 1.93 lbs
• Parsley 1.0 oz
• Weekly Total 7.03 lbs

While this seems like a lot of harvest for one week, I have to remember that this is what we got after three weeks of not harvesting anything during our absence.  But for now, looking at these numbers and just knowing how much fresh homegrown vegetables we were able to enjoy this week makes me downright giddy!

4/25 Harvest - Pea Shoots

Our peas are growing well enough that I felt that it would be safe to harvest some young pea shoots this weekend.  This would have been totally unthinkable last year, when what few pea seedlings I had constantly struggled against the hot weather (in both spring and fall!), cutworms and bunny attacks. 

Since this was my first time harvesting pea shoots, I wanted to be careful, just in case it somehow negatively affected the future growth of these plants.  I am, after all, growing them more for peas and not for shoots.  For this trial run, I snipped off the top 3-4 inches of just a few plants.  I'll go back and inspect the cut plants next week and see if they are still continuing to grow and branching off from leaf nodes below the cut tip, like they are supposed to.

I also snipped off some overwintered basil to make pizza and breadsticks (garlic basil).  Basil grew fast and furious in our garden last year to a point where I got tired of harvesting and processing it.  But having (far) less of it this winter has made me appreciate it more in the kitchen. 

I forgot to take pictures of the finished products, but here is one picture of my first attempt at garlic basil breadsticks just before they were popped in the oven.  They turned out pretty tasty, although I think I will try upping the amount of both garlic and basil next time.

Check out Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting!

Garden Tour - Mid April

The Indiana garden is still looking pretty bare and naked, but here's a quick tour.  I thought I would be a lot more organized and plan/re-plan where everything was going to be planted down to the last square foot, but actually, I really just kind of slacked off this winter.  I have loose ideas of where I want things to grow, but in reality, I've just been sowing seeds where there is empty space, deciding locations and space allocations of each vegetable on the fly. 

Right Side: In the first (bottom) bed, we have three rows of peas (several varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas).  These peas took about two weeks to germinate after mid-March sowing, but they have been growing really well since then.  Germination was good for the most part, except for that empty patch you see in the middle row, about 3 feet down.  I don't know what happened there, but it looks like about 4-5 peas didn't germinate or got eaten by a mysterious pest.

The rest of this pea bed has been sown with sugarloaf chicory, china choy, purple top turnip, spinach, lettuce, and swiss chard.  They are difficult to see in this picture, but most of them have germinated and have started growing.  Hopefully all the rain forecasted for this week will help with the growing process.

The second (middle) bed currently has some carrots and onions.  The rest of that bed and the third (top) bed will be planted with many different kinds of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and okra, all currently growing indoors under lights.

Here's a close-up of the healthy pea seedlings, about 2 weeks after germination.  After two dismal pea growing attempts last year (spring and fall), it makes me so happy to see these healthy seedlings, all 12 feet of them.  We need to get the trellis up asap in the next week or two, since these peas look like they are ready to put on some height.

Left Side: The first (bottom) bed has all sorts of teeny tiny seedlings that recently germinated and are peeking their heads out of the soil.  You can hardly see them in this picture, but in person, this whole bed is full of new sprouts consisting of cilantro, parsley, dill, all sorts of lettuce, arugula, turnip, beet, chard, radish, spinach, and a few more peas. 

The second (middle) bed has garlic, parsnip, onion, chives, bok choy, tatsoi, Red Russian Kale, Dwarf Blue Curled Kale, mizuna, Seven Top turnip, radish, carrots and broccoli.  I probably could have started a lot of these indoors, but I was lazy and didn't want to plan that far in advance.  So all of my spring vegetables were  directly sown outside, except for broccoli.

The third (top) bed is currently empty, but will be planted with zucchini, winter squash, cucumbers, melons, and beans.  I guess I will also be rotating beans into the other beds with peas and other cool weather veggies once they start to bolt/die this summer.

This is a close up of a section of the left middle bed, where I transplanted very small broccoli seedlings last weekend.  Looks like I'm growing plastic bottles here.  I wanted to see if these tiny broccoli seedlings would survive outside (I still have a few more seedlings growing under lights, just in case), but it was really cold and windy last weekend, so I wanted to give them a little extra protection.

I sowed the broccoli seeds indoors under lights about three weeks ago, and I think they took a little less than 1 week to germinate, so these seedlings are about two weeks old in this picture.

There's still lots of work left to be done in this area.  We have to finish building the inside fence (to completely fence off this area from dogs and bunnies) and put up vertical support for all the tall-growing vegetables.  Then I would like to clean up the rest of this garden area, get some of the remaining in-ground weeds under control and figure out where I can plant some flowers.  As the weather warms up in May, I'll also have to transplant or direct sow warm weather vegetables (solanums and cucurbits) in the remaining three raised beds.  We also have a small in-ground side garden on the east side of the house (this main garden area is on the south side of the house) that I need to clean up, since it's just been left alone with some inadvertently overwintered vegetables and herbs.

Oof, just thinking about these upcoming garden tasks makes me want to take a long nap!

The peas are alive

The peas that I sowed on March 19th (because I read somewhere that peas are traditionally sown right after St. Patrick's Day; also, it was a nice warm-ish day on March 19th) have finally germinated after nearly two weeks.  I took this picture last Saturday (4/2/11).

I recently read on other garden blogs about some of the more experienced gardeners soaking their peas in either plain water or Vitamin C water before sowing them.  I didn't know about any of this, so I sowed dry peas straight out of the seed envelope.  Fortunately, I had really good germination - over 95%, I think.  Yes, it did take almost two weeks for these peas to germinate, but I think that had more to do with the cold freezing temperatures right after my sowing day, and less to do with the fact that the peas were dry.  I do remember from last year that the dry peas germinated relatively quickly (3-5 days) under "normal cool" temperatures.

I did not have much luck growing peas in Indiana last year (on the other hand, the peas I sowed in my mom's California garden thrived all fall/winter/spring long).  The spring peas were planted too late to have enough cool weather to grow, and the fall peas were obliterated by cutworms.  This year, I have high expectations for these peas.  I'm growing a few different varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas.  I planted two rows of them across one of my raised beds - that's two 12-foot rows of sugar snap and snow peas.  Hopefully they will all grow well and give me more than a handful of peas.

Growing Tomato Seedlings

I'm worried about my rear, er, I mean, my peas.  I thought I was doing the right thing by direct sowing my peas right after St. Patrick's Day, when it felt nice and warm (relatively speaking).  I thought the spring was finally here.  Unfortunately, the frigid winter weather came back to Indiana right after I sowed my peas, and now I'm worried that they are all toast.  I guess I will find out soon.

In the meantime, I've been busy tending to the indoor tomato seedlings.

Yes, these are all tomato seedlings, with a few peppers thrown in for good measure.  I didn't actually mean to grow so many tomatoes this year, but I was gifted a stack of tomato seed envelopes (15+ heirloom varieties)  that were about 6 years old by a Craigslister last year, and I wanted to see if any of them were still viable.  So I planted them all by throwing 6 seeds (of the same variety) into each cell of the cell packs, and wouldn't you know it, I saw germination in just about every single cell with anywhere from 1-6 sprouts.  Ack, I felt like the gardener version of Octomom.  Right now, I have multiple seedlings per variety growing under lights, but I'll probably end up transplanting only one plant per variety.  I would grow more, but I don't think I have enough room in the garden.

By the way, this is the new grow light setup that I convinced Keith to build for me.  After considering various less-than-optimum options for a grow light setup in the house (we just don't have any extra room to set up tables and hang lights), Keith came up with the brilliant idea of hanging a couple of shop lights under the breakfast bar and re-purposing a spare shelf piece (the kind for closets) to support seedling trays. At the moment, the shelf is propped up by a couple of bricks sitting on the bar stools so that the seedlings can be close to the lights, and we'll adjust/remove the bricks as the seedlings grow taller to give them more growing room.

All of the seeds were first germinated in recycled egg cartons and cell packs in our grow box.  But I discovered that the seedlings were leaning towards the light, which is unfortunately set up vertically in the middle of the grow box.

I was really losing sleep thinking about how these seedlings were growing leaning towards the light.  But now that we have a new grow light setup, hopefully these babies will grow up straight.

Speaking of babies, these tomatoes are going to be ahem, "legitimate" babies because Keith and I are getting married in May.  Of all the things to fuss about over planning a wedding, would you believe that one of my top concerns is how the vegetable garden is going to fare without us during our two week honeymoon?  Priorities, you know.

Fall Vegetable Gardening in Southern California

With Halloween just around the corner, there's no denying that the holidays are not too far away.  I've been busy this week trying to finalize several different travel plans involving multiple trips "all over the country" (five states in three different time zones count, right?) while attempting to coordinate with many different family members' holiday plans as much as possible.  But that's almost all done now, so back to blogging!
 
Since there isn't much going on in the Indiana garden right now, I'll provide an update on my California garden.  Yes, I call it my garden now, instead of my mom's garden.

Last time I was in CA, I weeded the whole side garden and added some more soil/compost.  I also put down some 12 inch paver stones so that I could walk across them and reach the back part of the garden, because it was almost impossible to reach the part of the garden against the wall without breaking my back while kneeling/squatting on the concrete side path.

This is what the finished garden looked like.  After my aggressive weeding, the only thing left in the garden was the cut-and-come-again lettuce mix.

Side profile of the new and improved garden

This side garden is approximately 4 feet wide by 24 feet long.  After I finished preparing the garden, I planted it with all kinds of seeds for cool-weather crops: radishes, sugar snap peas, cilantro, parsley, carrots, parsnip, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, mustard, swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, etc.  According to my CA peeps, the garden has fully germinated and is now full of lots of healthy two-week-old seedlings. 

Cherry Belle radish seedlings

Daikon radish seedling

The seedling pictures - taken with an iPhone camera - are courtesy of my sister, whom I've been bugging to email me some picture updates of my garden babies. 

 Sugar snap pea seedlings

I'll be visiting CA again in a few weeks and will provide more updates then.  It's really exciting to have a "new" fall garden to look forward to, while my Indiana garden (a bust this fall anyway due to all kinds of evil garden pests) is hunkering down for the winter.  We're expecting our first frost tonight in Indiana.  In contrast, I think the average daytime highs in my California garden will remain around 60 - 70 F degrees for most of the winter, with the nighttime lows around 40 - 50 F degrees.  As a new vegetable gardener, I totally have a newfound appreciation for the mild climate in Southern California!

10/18/10 Harvest Still Trickling In

We're only a couple of days away from the average first frost date in Indianapolis, but it looks like we may be lucky enough get through the rest of October without seeing any frost.  This would make for a very warm October for our area.  The weather was really beautiful this weekend with the daytime highs in the 70s.  Keith and I took advantage of this by taking a Saturday evening walk to the neighborhood liquor store (0.6 miles from the house) to buy some beer (the cashier looked at us a little funny when Keith put the beers in his backpack) and then enjoying a Sunday morning stroll before breakfast to admire various elaborate Halloween decorations around the neighborhood.

In the garden, the warm weather has allowed another handful of Jelly Bean tomatoes to ripen on the vine.  The plants themselves are looking pretty sorry and bare, but as long as the tomatoes stay edible, I won't complain.

In addition to the Jelly Bean tomatoes, this week's harvest included several more ripe cayenne peppers, a few sugar snap peas, one small radish and some green beans (both green and golden).  The green beans were our first harvest from the bush beans currently growing in the indoor grow box, so we were pretty excited to add green beans to the list of our grow box vegetables.

I also harvested two salads' worth of baby lettuce.  I don't know why they look so pale in this picture, but they looked normal in person.

Oh, I also harvested another serving's worth of asian greens.  I might have had two servings' worth, but the cabbage worms took their share before I got there.  I know, because I picked 15 fat and happy cabbage worms off of my greens.  Well, they were probably happy before I picked them off and drowned them in a container of water.

Bok Choy: If this is not rude, I don't know what is.

I also tackled the mass of basil growing in the garden.  Basil is probably the number one thing that grew like weed in the garden this year.  Next year, I will grow fewer plants.

Here's about one pound of basil.  I made a triple batch of pesto, and am currently in the process of air-drying the rest of the basil leaves for future consumption.

10/4/10 First Harvest of Fall Crops

The night time lows dropped to high 30s this weekend.  In California, this would be considered winter.  In Indiana, as in the most of the rest of the country, I guess this is fall. 

I harvested my first small batch of fall vegetables, consisting of some baby Red Russian Kale and a sampling of baby asian greens including bok choy, china choi (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), and tatsoi.  I'm having a lot of trouble keeping these plants alive due to serious damage by cabbage worms, aphids, and possibly slugs (the only one I haven't visually confirmed yet).  You can see a little bit of the damage to the surviving leaves in the picture above, but this is nothing compared to the damage to the non-surviving plants.

Since I didn't have any prior experience handling these hardy greens, either as a gardener or a consumer (except when they are included in a prepared dish), I wasn't sure how big I should let them grow.  I harvested these leaves fairly small because I was curious about their flavor and also because I don't trust the pests to allow them to grow to a decent size.  I've already lost almost half of my crops to the stinky pests that munch on them leaf by leaf, leading to total destruction.  I did finally sprinkle some Sluggo out there today, so if there are any invisible slugs out there, hopefully Sluggo can start controlling the problem.

By the way, these greens were delicious as a quick stir-fry.  Between Keith and me, there was barely enough to have three or four bites each.  These cook down a lot, just like spinach.  Inspired by our first tasting of these tasty hardy greens, Keith and I sowed more seeds in our indoor grow box today.  We're hoping to grow this new batch to maturity entirely in the grow box to avoid the pest problems in the garden.  I'm not sure how much room the full-sized versions of these vegetables will require, so this will be yet another grow box experiment for us.  Next year, I'll grow them all under row covers outside.

I also harvested the first three sugar snap peas from my remaining three plants that survived the cutworm attack.  They were still too small and did not taste very sweet.

The outdoor Jelly Bean tomato plants are still pumping out tomatoes, although they are very slow to ripen.  I picked a handful that had any hint of blush, so that they can finish up the ripening process indoors.  Only one Jelly Bean tomato has ripened in the indoor grow box so far.  But since we don't have to worry about the impending first frost in the grow box, I'll just let them take their time to ripen on the vine.

This post is part of Daphne's Harvest Monday.

Cutworm Damage to Sugar Snap Pea Seedlings

As I work out of state during the week, I sometimes text Keith to get current status reports on our garden vegetables.

"Hey, how are the peas doing?"

"Um... Oh, did I tell you that we have peppers growing in the grow box now?"

"Oh No.  What's wrong with the peas?"

"We have lots of new baby peppers!  They look really good!"

"TELL ME ABOUT THE PEAS"

"They don't look so good."

I must have bad pea karma, because I just can't seem to grow them in my Indiana garden.  Due to my first-year gardening inexperience, sugar snap peas were planted too late this spring (mid-May), and what few seedlings that tried to survive either got munched on by wild rabbits or got fried crispy brown by the hot weather.  On the other hand, the same peas that I planted in my mom's garden just thrived in the cool coastal California weather this summer and gave my mom pound after pound of fresh and sweet sugar snap peas.

As we slowly transitioned from summer to fall, I was determined to try my hand at pea-growing once again.  I direct sowed them in a shadier part of the herb garden in early August.  All the peas germinated within a week.  I even called them my butt peas.  Everything seemed to be going really well.

 My precious Butt Pea seedlings towards the end of August

Then a few weeks ago, I discovered that more than half of the seedlings had fallen over, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and went snip snip around the base of the seedlings.  There were also a few seedlings that were cut off at the bottom, but looked like they were still up because their tendrils were holding hands with other seedlings. These were literally floating in mid-air, like ghost peas!

Even though I haven't personally seen any cutworms yet, I knew from my pest research that they were the culprit here.  Those darn cutworms!  I tried to find them by digging around the fallen seedlings, but I couldn't find any.  I protected the remaining seedlings by pulling cardboard cylinders - empty paper towel rolls and toilet paper rolls cut about 2-3 inches tall - over them.  I have no pictures from this day, because I was too mad to play photographer.

I really hoped that the remaining pea seedlings would survive, but a few more of them just dried up brown from the bottom without any apparent physical damage to the stems. Not sure what caused that.

 Some remaining pea seedlings died this slow browning death

We still have a few pea seedlings that survived this ordeal and are trying to set flowers, but the pea patch is much more sparse than I had planned and I just don't have a lot of hope left for the remaining few pea vines.  The level-headed side of me thinks, oh well, I'll just have to try again next year.

But what I really want to say is: WAHHHH, I WANT MY PEAS THIS YEAR!

8/16/10 Harvest - California Garden

This week's harvest is from my "other" garden at my mom's house in California, where I spent this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed some civilized weather (highs in the 70s, lows in the 60s) after enduring months of brutal heat in Middle America.  Anyway, I sowed the seeds for carrots, sugar snap peas, and zucchini about three months ago during my last visit, along with some onions sets.  That plus asking my mom on the phone how "my vegetables" are doing once a week is about the extent of my involvement with these vegetables.

The onions didn't size up much.  The sugar snap pea vines are about 3/4 dead (brown and brittle), but the remaining 1/4 of the vines are still putting on new growth, blossoms, and peas - they just keep going like the energizer bunny!  The zucchini plant has gotten very big and is just about covered with powdery mildew, but they are still growing new fruits.  The carrots just amazed me with their size.

Look at these carrots!  I discussed the Girthy Carrot on Saturday.  After pulling the largest carrot, I stopped at five, because I didn't know what my mom would do with so many big carrots all at once.  There are still another dozen or so of these in the ground.  Ugh, why can't I grow carrots like this in my garden in Indiana, instead of the puny little matchstick ones? 

I didn't sow these seeds, but this salad mix is also from my mom's garden.  All kinds of lettuce seem to grow really well here, pretty much all year long.  It's kind of bizarre, really.  I would love to give credit to my mom for having a green thumb, but I honestly don't think that she does - she still waters everything from the top with a garden hose!

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvest stories.

Butt Peas

Are you all familiar with T9, the predictive text technology for mobile phones?  Because I still don't have an iPhone, blackberry, Droid or one of those other smartphones (I know, I know, how prehistoric of me), I have my simple phone set on T9 mode for texting.  It works fine for the most part, but I do have to watch out for some common words that have the same number combination.

For example, when I press 6-3 to type me, sometimes the phone automatically types of.  Other common confusing word pairs are: them-then; sun-run; go-in.  OK, you get the idea.

Anyway, I looked up the weather for Indianapolis this morning and saw that they were forecasting HOT (aka 90+ F degrees) for the rest of the week.  This made me really worry about the fall peas that I just sowed two weekends ago.  As I learned earlier this summer, peas do not fare well in the heat!  So I texted Keith to ask about the peas, but apparently my text went through like this:

"rear doing okay?"

Fortunately, Keith is familiar with my texts often containing random T9-generated words, so he knew right away that I was in fact asking about the well-being of the peas, and not his butt.  Because that would be weird.  And because we are a couple of adults in our early thirties who still appreciate junior high humor, the remainder of the text conversation quickly degenerated into something about playing with peas in the rear.  Awesome.

In case you're wondering, the peas have germinated and are reportedly putting on some height even in this heat.  I asked Keith to take a close-up of the rear.  I mean, the peas.

Sugar Snap Peas on 8/11/10 (Day 11)

From here on out, I shall call these peas, BUTT PEAS!  That sounds better than Rear Peas, don't you think?


Related Post:

• Sugar Snap Peas in California vs. Indiana

Sugar Snap Peas in California vs. Indiana

Back in early May, I visited my mom in Southern CA and sowed a few sugar snap peas in her small side yard.  Later that same week, I sowed more of the same peas - yes, I traveled with my seed envelope - here in our garden in Indiana.  Fast forward two months, and take a look at the difference between the two pea patches:
 
Indiana peas:

and California peas:

Our Indiana peas never really had a chance, what with the wild bunnies first nibbling the seedlings down to sad little nubs, and then getting toasted extra crispy in this heat in the last month or so.  I got two whole sugar snap peas out of my 16 plants last week.

The California peas, on the other hand, have been enjoying the unusually cool spring/summer weather for the last two months, and there are no wild bunnies in my mom's densely populated urban neighborhood.  I'm told that the pea vines have been growing like mad, already outgrowing the 4-foot trellis and reaching for the sky.

I know now that early May is too late to sow peas here in Indiana.  I will definitely start earlier next spring.

7/5/10 Harvest Monday

First an update on last week's Green Onion Experiment:

They are growing!  Slowly, yes, but all the green onion root stubs from last week are making progress.  In the picture below (click on photo to enlarge), you can see tiny bits of green starting to come up from the 1/8-inch long root stubs that I cut off from three full-grown green onions last week.  The root stubs from green onions thinnings, which were cut longer at around 1 inch each, have green growth of more than an inch already. The rest of the large green onions in this pot have been growing for about two months now from 2-inch root stubs of supermarket green onions.

I harvested the rest of the full-grown green onions from this pot.  Unfortunately, some of the white bulb parts got mushy and infested with onion maggots (ewwww), so those got tossed.  The rest of them look good enough to eat.

I also got a couple (yes, only TWO) of tiny sugar snap peas from my pea plants that I thought were dead.  And the bush beans are starting to produce some green beans.

One of these days, I hope I will actually harvest more than a pound of veggies in a week.  I get such a huge case of vegetable envy every time I see mouth-watering pictures of other people's large and colorful harvests.

See Daphne's Harvest Monday for other veggie growers' harvests.