Growing, Growing....Gone.

Can we talk about how awesome our greenery looks right now?

Everything is coming up and it looks like spring. I love it. I have already thinned by radishes and carrots once and it looks like the need it again (first planter). I have onions and turnips in the second planter. The onions are going crazy. I planted them from sets, so I wasn't really worried they were going to come up, but it's my first time growing them, so it's an interesting experiment. Speaking of experiments, what's going on in that third planter??

IT'S PEAS!! NOM NOM NOM NOM.

I love peas. I remember picking handful after handful as a child and sitting in the grass, shelling them, and immediately popping them into my mouth. Better than candy!

Well, maybe just as good as candy.


Much better than green beans. Dad would always plant about three rows too many and it would take hours to strip them all of the plants, wash, cut and can them. Sure, they were great to have around in the winter, but it took up way too much of my prime grass-laying time.

I was getting worried that my peas were getting too tall to support themselves last week.  They're about four inches tall and, with the beautiful weather this week, will probably have another growth spurt. When I was working "in the field" down by Cougar, WA, I picked up some downed branches on the side of the road to make a pea trellis. I lashed the branches together with hemp twine (discovered in my craft bin) and ran some twine up in lines for the peas grow along. I like it. I think it's cute and artsy-fartsy. AND, it's solves my problem!

I got some flack from "some people" about trying to plant too much in my raised bed. Well, take a look and see for yourselves.

Two tomatoes and a pepper, followed by a patch of onions. Rows of radishes and carrots (alternating), green onion, romaine lettuce (from seed), and spinach in front of two cucumbers, two zucchini, and MORE PEAS! One of my cucumbers looks like it got attacked by a wild animal (potentially the long-haired cat I saw running around right after I planted it) and I don't think it's going to make it. I may be surprised when the weather is consistently this nice, but for now I'm calling him dying.

I planted the peas in the bed about two and a half weeks after ones in the planter. While the planter peas are trying their damnedest to reach the trellis, these guys are just now peeping their heads out of the soil. I was worried they might not pop up and all of my hard work creating the other trellis would be for naught.

This guy, made from old fence boards Dad so kindly sawed into 1.5 inch pieces for  me, will hopefully allow my peas, cucumbers and zucchini to grow vertically instead of horizontally. My only concern is that I'll need to somehow tie the top to the wall so the awesome weight of my harvest won't tip it over. Luckily, there is some sort of strange screw sticking out of the middle of the wall that I can probably rig the trellis to.

Other yummy goodies planted around our yard include:
*Organic tomato
*Heirloom tomato
*Red pepper
*Mustard greens
*Butter lettuce
*Blackberries

Okay, so the blackberries are invasives that may or may not bear fruit this year. I pulled a bunch of teeny tiny ones, but let two of the decently big ones grow, just because I was hoping for fruit. Apparently I'm a bad environmentalist. But don't worry, Leda pulled all the English ivy that was growing on our fence, so at least we have that going for us.