Planted Purple, Popping Peas, Picking Peppy Peppers

Our perennial garden is beginning to break out in color. Lots of purple now. We snuck some annuals in, too, and are waiting for gold, orange and reds to erupt with the marigolds, zinnias and sunflowers.

The pea vine is flourishing! We couldn't resist picking a couple of pods (just to check whether they were ripe!) and popping them open to try the tasty peas inside. And tasty they were, though one connoisseur suggested we wait another week to harvest the first batch. Drat.

We have two 20 ft. rows of various peppers in the middle of the garden, and all are happy with the location. We have already delivered bell and banana peppers with our lettuce for a peppy salad, and expect we'll be delivering for at least a month!

We love summer!

Lots of Small Hands in the Garden

Our gardeners from the Child Development Center picked icicle radishes for delivery.
They brought one radish back to taste - and their teacher reports that they were not big fans, but it was fun trying out a new experience!

They also have been weeding. After their first session, they came back a week later and were surprised to find new weeds!

Salad Delivery

We've delivered radishes, peppers, chard, herbs and all sorts of salad fixings for Lewis House.

Growing

The garden is growing and growing.

Strawberry Harvest

Meg, the garden volunteer who adopted our fledgling strawberry patch, just made the season's first delivery to Lewis House: Strawberries! We should be able to begin weekly deliveries by the end of June. Granted the harvest was only two handfuls so Meg stopped by the grocery store for a little strawberry reinforcement on her way to Lewis House.

Construction, Mulching, and Weeding

Give a group of volunteers a perfect day and four hours in the garden and you'll end up with a long list of to do's done.

We planned on just building a critter fence to enclose both the original garden and last September's addition along with putting the tomato trellis back up.

We ended up finishing both construction projects and spreading 16 bags of donated mulch on the perennial side and digging in some compost around the tomatoes and transplanting some volunteer onion and bok choy plants and thinning a row of beans and weeding.

The Last of the Planting

Even the "hot" weather plants are in and lucky for us the garden is watered by an automatic sprinkler system. We've gone weeks without significant rain.

Tomato

Eggplant

Pepper