Eating from my garden

The main vegetable garden

Today I had a small tomato and a handful of blueberries from my garden. I watched a small sparrow also enjoying my blueberries. It just takes a bite out of a berry and leaves the rest; the berry dries out and eating it is like eating a raisin.

Last night my neighbour told me the raspberries are ripe now, there's a small patch on a strip of no-man's-land adjacent to his back yard. His wife doesn't like them so he and I gather and eat them. We take turns, he goes into the patch one day and I go the next. I got half a pint today.

I pulled up all my snow pea plants. I got an amazing crop this year, so many that I am debating whether to plant again or not. Usually I can get two crops a year but I really already have enough. My green beans are just starting to produce, I got about a pint today. I grow French green beans which are long and narrow, I really like them. Also the plants produce beans twice in a season, if I leave the plants alone then after a few weeks of nothing a second round of beans appears.

I planted a bunch of different kinds of tomatoes in different places. The tomato I ate today was from a patch of patio tomatoes in my front yard. The plants are tiny, less than ten inches high, but full of tomatoes. In my back yard I have tomato plants that are now six feet tall. I've never seen tomato plants so tall! I have a feeling that they devoted so much energy to growing tall that they are not really going to produce a lot of fruit. We'll see.

The snow peas were blocking the light to one of my onion patches so now they are getting much more sunshine. I hope that means they will catch up with the other onion patch. My winter squashes all died, the zucchini is surviving and I've already eaten two of them. The cucumber plants also died, although I got three little cucumbers from the last one. I have replanted, we'll see how they do.

I don't know how the garlic is doing but I suspect not well. I harvested the scapes last week and called another neighbour to let him know I had some for him. He used to be a great gardener but hip problems put paid to that. He likes the scapes and he gives me gardening advice. I have not actually talked to him since before the pandemic, although we have occasionally waved to each other. He's a great chatter, a conversation with him usually lasts an hour and we cover all sorts of topics. We talked today about the local controversy over turning Main Street into a one-way street. Nobody is neutral on that, everyone is either very much pro or very much con. He thinks it's great, me not so much.

And lastly my potato patch is in full bloom. I think the flowers are quite lovely, I would happily grow potatoes just for the flowers.