Tenderly, tenderly

I was just passing messages back and forth with Christa about hating to harvest. As seen below, my veggies look so happy that I am loathe to bother them.
The Cascadian peas are sweet and dripping with rain:

I don’t know when to harvest the Red Russian Kale, but it looks so pleased next to beany buddies.:

Happily, I need not worry about the tomatoes

or the grapes (which are trying to get into the guitar store) until much later in the season.

Note the bright blue planters that I built. They are made of old shelving units, my former neighbor’s nightstand, and some cedar wainscoting that was on sale for having a ripped package. They are painted with AFM Safecoat Very Low VOC Exterior paint in Cerulean Blue. I love this paint and the people behind it are lovely, upstanding folk who make their product in the US and have gone about it the right way, by not putting any toxic garbage into it. I thought the blue would be very nice against the green, especially once the marigolds and petunias pop up everywhere. So far, not too many flowers, but that will change (I hope).

The grapes flowered last week, (maybe 5/29?) and I believe I am allergic to the pollen, but only sneezy. Hopefully the bees and wasps and whatever pollinates them went nuts, because it has rained most days this week. If we get as many grapes as there were flowers, we will have a bumper crop and possibly, a collapsed grape arbor.

I planted the tomatoes from greenmarket sixpacks on Memorial day. I spent 20 bucks replacing the seeds that didn’t germinate well or don’t grow well from seeds. All told, I believe only $5 of fedco seeds weren’t successful, which is a million-fold increase over last year’s results. (75% have been successful, and wildly so.) Yay Fedco! (To be fair, some of last year’s failures were 100% successful this year with better planting habits and timelines, such as Cascadia Snap Pea from Seeds of Change.) I probably should’ve thinned the peas, but can do next year.

In other big news, the white Bleeding Heart plant that I rescued from a garden project in the Bronx has come back from the dead. Good to know, as it was totally flattened by the wind in the back of the truck. It resprouted all over the place, and should be healthy enough to put in a prettier container soon.
The Liriope and Lemon balm looked good the next day, but I knew they would be forgiving.

Next week I will post pictures of the Herb Stairs I made, as well as the rain barrel which I am acquiring from NYC DEP’s Rain Barrel program. If you are at all intimidated by rain barrels, I assure you they are easy peasy pie, and only make your life better and cheaper. I hooked up (and will again) connect a drip system to it, which makes your life even more betterer and cheaperer.

I am off to harvest, tenderly and lovingly, some mint and peas for dinner. Maybe we’ll have Kale too!

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