Lettuce – Jenmenke

And Asparagus Stalks All Over the Messy Row.

Mary, Mary would have a hard time with this stage of the garden. Let me illustrate:

9 am:

4 pm:

And finally, at 9 pm, right before I picked it:

And, no, I didn’t touch the ruler all day. Isn’t that amazing? I marvel every year in astonishment.

And then I go running around trying to unload asparagus on everyone I know. I should note that not two hours after my last writing when I finished with…

*now would be a convenient time for all you locals to conveniently stop by to drop off some fictitious object and casually ask for a ‘garden tour.’

…my friend Michelle’s husband showed up with 6 pallets for Charlie’s soon-to-be Airsoft gun war (God help me) and left with about a pound of asparagus. So, call me what you will, but don’t call me a liar.

Here is another astonishing thing I found in the garden last week:

Lettuce seedlings!

Last September, I re-seeded lettuce with plans for a fall crop. They never germinated. I couldn’t believe that it was because the weather was still too hot, because it was September, and only weeks away from the first frost. I never figured it out.

And then they germinated. Eight months and about 1000″ of snow later. I guess it was too hot. So yeah, I’ll be enjoying some early garden lettuce.

…and not much else, since I haven’t gotten anything else planted yet.

Maybe I can eat toasted woodticks sprinkled on top of my garden lettuce. I seem to have a lot of them hanging around my office.

For some reason, I imagine they would taste a lot like pine nuts. And they’re a lot cheaper, too.

I need a garden fix. I want to weed. I want to escape this stupid computer and stupid soccer and get the Hell out of my office. My dog is ready to implode. I have chicks in my laundry room. The cats are sitting in the trees with the bird feeders. It’s raining. It’s cold. And I never went looking for more Morel mushrooms. My asparagus has stopped growing. I want to take a bath. I want to take a bath and go back to bed. I want to eat banana bread in the bath and then go to bed.

Waa waa wahh.

How’s that for a pity party? I’m good at those. Oh. I forgot one thing. I have a headache. I had two meager glasses of wine last night after a long day and today I have a headache. So stupid.

With plenty of work-work to do today (work-work is my made up word meaning ‘real work’ for ‘real clients’), I put on my ugly hood (shown on model with the face I use to scare my kids with):

And went out to feed the chickens, the birds, empty the compost bucket and take some garden pictures. Come along for the ride…

First stop: Let the chickens out. You think that’s a scary face in the photo above? How about this one? Especially when he flies at your face. I have a big stick I use to keep him in his place.

Sadly, I lost one of my two hens — on MOTHER’S DAY of all days. She must have flown out of the 7′ high fence. We are blaming Lola.

Next stop: Empty the compost and check out the garden.

That’s looking back toward the house. You can see that not much has happened in the last three weeks.

Lettuce, spinach, kale, arugula and cilantro are all just eeking along.

One big surprise are the strawberry plants. They were new last year. I struggled with bugs and this year I have removed the straw mulch, having read it makes the bug problem worse. My *plan* is to keep the refuse under the plants very clean. We’ll see how that goes…

Look at all the blooms!

Here is the garlic, planted last Fall. It is huge compared to other years. The heavy snowfall protected the bulbs and I didn’t lose even one. I predict a June harvest instead of last year’s August harvest. That is both good and bad. Good because I’ll have garlic sooner, bad because it is much harder to store through the hot months.

Here are those scary red potatoes I planted in early March. They are doing well, except for the frost damage from last weekend.

It got down to 28 here in Watertown. See the damage?

And they were even covered with a heavy blanket:

In fact, I tried to cover EVERYTHING with blankets, which was actually quite funny:

So glad I did. Not sure what the apples will do, but you can tell which blossoms were covered and which weren’t.

Here are those shallot plants I was so worried wouldn’t fill in. I should have planted the bulbs last Fall with the garlic, but I forgot. They went into the ground in late March. Most came up and and I am excited. I haven’t had shallots in several years.

I have a bunch more pictures to share, but my ‘work-work’ awaits. After the garden/compost stop, I filled the bird feeders. Thanks to Red-Winged Blackbirds, my gallon-sized feeders have to be filled daily if I want to sustain my little Chickadees, Nuthatches, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers and so on. On the way, I pass my very favorite shrub, the Snowball Viburnum:

I hack about six feet off this thing every year. (I have no idea how large it would eventually get.) I’m trying to prune it so that the left side sort of arches over the path. Yeah. Good luck on that one. I’m a spaz with a pruning saw…

That’s the flower close-up. It is the most gorgeous chartreuse green at this time of year. No scent to the flower, unfortunately, but man are they pretty in a vase.

Then it’s back into my God-Forsaken house with my God-Forsaken animals and the new God-Forsaken chicks.