Twisty & Rooty

Two months of gardening and finally the results are starting to show. This week our radishes have started to reach the point where at least some needed to be pulled. In fact they should have come out a week ago or more but I thought leaving them in a little longer might let them grow bigger... plumper... rounder. Unfortunately that's not what they had in mind. They decided instead to stay long and narrow. Then they decide to get all twisty and rooty looking.

But more is happening than twisty radishes. Our peas have started to finally flower. This means we'll see some peas in the next week or two. We won't have as many as some of the sunnier gardens, which by the way have had peas for a few weeks. Our's are taller, their's are making peas.

Our original planting of lettuce had almost all been eaten by some critter, but for two of our original plantings. those two are doing well despite the loss of so many of their family members to the great beast. We replaced  much of that lettuce with cheater's lettuce. Cheater's lettuce because we bought them already half grown and then we planted them in place of the fallen soldiers. I almost feel guilty wanting to pluck leaves from any of the non original heads, but I'm going to need something to eat with those twisty radishes.

Last night I once again thinned the beets. It was pretty obvious that some were doing far better than others. So I made the command decision to pull about a half dozen to a dozen wimpy beets. I took them home, cleaned up the leaves and steamed them and served them up with a little butter and salt. Meg and I loved them. Annie, not so much.

Last night also included the addition of two locations of cantaloupe, but I'm not convinced we'll have any luck with those. In August at our local farmers market you can get locally grown musk melons. Have you ever had a musk melon? It looks a lot like a cantaloupe, but it's larger and has pronounced grooves, almost like a pumpkin. Anyway, these locally grown musk melons are a personal fave of mine. I have to buy two because I know I'll eat the first one when I get back to the house. The other is for later on when I wish I had another and lo and behold there's another right there.

We added a couple more herbs to our herb garden last night. We had basil already, but decided to get a second different variety to mix it up. Then I saw some lemon thyme and that sounded good to me... so in it went. I have to report that Meg's cilantro that she planted recently is starting to grow. I actually tore off a leaf the other day and ate it, just to make sure it was the cilantro and not a weed.

Speaking of weeds... if weeds were edible we would be amazing weed farmers. We grow more weeds than we do vegetables. I guess that's the reality of it all anyway, right? I mean the world is covered in things that grow and perhaps its edible to something but most of it isn't edible for us and we call them weeds. Weeds have played a part in our history for as long as we've maintained cultivated land. According to the book of genesis, after the serpent convinced Eve and then Eve convinced Adam to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God drops this little nugget on them:

"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground"

Oh, that crafty little serpent, tricksey he is.