How Does Your Garden Grow?

Cool pictures of the same stalk of asparagus taken on days one through four. (And yes, that stalk is also included in the bundle we’ll be eating tonight, pictured below!) Now that we finally got some rain, I think I could go out hourly and take similar pictures of the asparagus bed. In fact in the heart of the growing season, I often pick the asparagus two times in a single day! Tonight I am picking what is ready (about 10 spears) and making risotto with it.

Most seeds are planted: radish, kale, lettuce, cilantro, arugula, spinach, swiss chard, peas, sugar snaps, onion sets, seed potatoes, parsnips, beets. I need to buy carrot and corn seed and I won’t plant bean seeds for another couple weeks.

Raspberries are weeded and growing. Another garden item of note were the 5 little clumplettes of garlic that have been on one side of a planter box for about 3 years. (I can’t even remember their genesis.) Yet they come up every year, which is more than I can say for the garlic I plant in the fall… And, since I needed the room this year, I dug them up and found perfect little individual garlic plants. I didn’t have room to plant them all seperately, so I replanted one bunch in a better place, and saved the rest for eating with our risotto tonight. Hopefully the plantings will make up for the LAME hard necks that didn’t come up so well this year. (Softnecks didn’t disappoint.)

And, I am heading out soon to pick my first Rhubarb. The question is what to do with it: rhubarb cake, pie or crisp? (That question was quickly answered by Morgan, my daughter: crisp!) I am probably jumping the gun a bit, as the stalks are still pretty short, but it seems just fine.

Such a fun time of year. I never stop being amazed by all the green colors of spring. And with this rain, hopefully the morels will soon follow. Last year was horrible for morels in Minnesota, so I’m looking for a bumper crop.