first pea harvest

This is my first pea harvest. Snap peas and tendrils. Just a small amount. We actually ended up eating them raw in salad. There are many more out there fattening up on the vines.
harvests from my vegetable gardens

potato beetle

I found this guy on my potatoes this morning and looked him up. Surprise - he's a potato beetle: Threelined Potato Beetle (Lema trilineata). I'll have to watch out for him. But for now I just took his picture and left him alone.

Solanum tuberosum

spring vegetable flowers

From top left: green pea, arugula, broccoli, radish, another radish, snap pea, tomato, fava bean, Capucijner field pea.

a baby tomato!

Its a very exciting week. School's out, summer starts soon, the town pool is open, AND I have purple peas and baby tomatoes in my garden! It can't get much better than this. I can almost taste a fresh garden tomato ..... This tomato is a Rutgers. There are also baby fruit on my Chadwick's cherry.

Last year I found my first baby tomato on June 22. So this year's is almost exactly the same date. Even though I bought bigger plants that bloomed much earlier this year, the plants did not set fruit until the same time as last year. HHmmmm.

Solanum lycopersicum

a purple pea!

The purple podded Capucijner peas are starting to make pods.

Pisum sativum, spp. arvense

thinning carrots

I tried to seed the carrots more thinly this year, but still they have ended up very dense. I am starting now to thin them. They are still too small to eat. I thin them gradually - soon the baby roots will be large enough to munch on as I continue to thin the rows.

Daucus carota

garden photo

garden bugs

I've been trying to find some bees in my garden. I'm sad not to be able to find any after a week of watching. Here are the bugs I have found. I think the closest to a bee is the wasp. From top left: yellow fly on phlox, hopper on soy, green fly on chili peppers, long legs on iris, wasp, green hopper on arugula flower. If get around to submitting the photos to BugGuide I'll add accurate IDs here later. The bugs I didn't show here are all the black aphids enjoying themselves on my favas and a few green ones on my lettuce.

flowers for the bees

To attract bees, I have planted a bunch of flowers. I went down to Mahoney's Garden Center, an enormous place that has every imaginable plant, and walked around looking for flowers with honey bees on them. The busiest plant by far was the nepeta (catmint), which had several honey bees working away. There were also some small bees on the heliopsis table. I asked an employee which plants attracted most bees and he thought the lantanta, daisies and petunias were good. I purchased yellow lantana, nepeta, a daisy and two types of heliopsis. Some of these are in the pictures here. I'll hope these will attract some bees. I haven't seen any bees (except a couple of bumble bees) yet this year.

garden bees
Hymenoptera

fava flowers

Fava beans (broad beans) are a new crop for me this year. I'm looking forward to grilling some tender fresh beans. I have one 3.5 foot row of about 10 plants back behind my pole beans. This week they've started to bloom. Big black and white flowers on plants that are about 2 or 2.5 feet tall.

There are still a lot of black aphids on the plants. The aphids are on the top couple inches of the plants. Once I get another set of flowers, I'll cut off the tops of the plants to reduce the aphids and let the plants put all of their energy into making beans.
Vicia faba

the view from the window

aerial views of my home vegetable garden

farmer's market fare

Our local Farmer's Market is in a parking lot in our town center once a week. It has been open for two weeks now. We get about a dozen vendors. Often the farmer herself will be there to talk with. The major offering at the stands today was lots of lettuce greens of all different types (which I have in abundance in my garden right now). I bought asparagus, broccoli, purple scallions, spinach, radish, hot house tomatoes and a fresh free range chicken. Other offerings I saw: kohlrabi, chard, strawberries, garlic snapes and spring garlic. I believe a requirement for the vendors is that the crops are organically grown in Massachusetts at a small farm. Don't you love summer food!

Skippy in the garden

more pictures of skip
posts about Skippy

alpine strawberries

A couple of years ago I planted this little alpine strawberry along my stone walkway. It has little white flowers and small deep red strawberries all year. It doesn't send out runners and is slowly growing into a nice little clump. Its a nice care-free edging plant with the added benefit of sweet little berries to snack on.

alpine strawberries (Fraises des bois)

radish problems

Oh well. The radish crop was not so good. I planted a 3' row (about 20 radish plants) and only one radish formed a bulb. The rest are these skinny little roots and a couple are making flower stalks. The radish that did bulb has a root pest nibbling at it. I planted another row a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that one will do better. Otherwise, I'll skip the radish.

Brassicaceae

radish (Raphanus sativus)