Multicolored peas.

Lewisburg.

This may sound silly, but I'm thrilled to grow unusually-colored vegetables.¹ Sometimes, especially in the case of normally-green vegetables, it makes harvesting ever so much easier. Snap beans striped with purple and yellow; blue-podded peas; yellow squash; because they're easier to see, I'm less likely to end up with oversized - and then often less than desirable - vegetables. There are some who like their zucchini bigger than a baseball bat, I guess, though I can't imagine why.

Picking a golden-podded pea or purple bean runs the risk of growing something that looks good, but is lacking in taste, or texture, or what have you. It happens, though I seem to have dodged the bullet this year. Golden peas? Genuinely excellent. Blue-podded peas are also good, enough that I'll grow them again. And as for those Sugar Snap peas?

They're delicious, but in an odd position. Syngenta's PVP has run out, and it seems that seed quality is in decline. The upside? Anyone can produce and sell the seed these days. The downside? For a while, at least, finding reliable seed's going to be tough. So... the 2010 catalogs may need some careful perusal. Perhaps 2010 is the year for experimenting with Cascadia, or Amish Snap, or something else.

Until then, however, I've got many, many fresh peas to enjoy. Fresh, multicolored peas:



Extra bonus: I can pick peas into just one bowl, without worry that I'll mix up those with edible pods and those without.

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¹Fruits, too, like yellow or orange raspberries, but they're more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to play around with.

Oh, does the garden ever grow.

Lewisburg.

It's been a rainy, cool spring. (Today: raining yet again.) This is good for some of the garden - i.e., the lettuces and other greens, the onions, the peas - and less than awesome for other parts of it, such as the tomatoes and peppers. Those hot-weather crops are doing well enough, considering. But it's unlikely to be a bumper crop year.

That's how it works, it seems; I doubt it's possible to have a perfect year of vegetable weather, one that'll goad every plant into producing like mad. The superproductive ones make up for the weak links, and the farmers' market and CSA options fill in the gaps.

And then there are strawberries:



This is just one of very, very many. Yesterday's picking brought us up to quart number sixty-two. That's just a shade under two bushels, though, admittedly, packing strawberries into bushel baskets would be especially disastrous. Or, to put it another way: at an approximate pound-and-a-quarter per quart, that's more than seventy-five pounds of strawberries. For less than thirty bucks' worth of plants put in last year, that's not a bad return. Plus, we've got plenty of jam, syrup, liqueur, and goodwill from friends to tide us through until next year's harvest.¹

The peas are coming on, too. Lovely purple flowers...



...turn into delicious golden pods:



Prolific and delicious, and I've had the presence of mind let a handful of pods grow to maturity for next year's planting.

Also maturing: blueberries. The bird netting's gone up - though the occasional crafty avian has already figured out a way inside - so we'll be transitioning from one fresh fruit to another. And making more jam...



Meanwhile, the garden proper is looking better by the day:



There is, of course, some very happy lettuce:



As well as some vigorous oregano, alive and well from last year:



The potatoes are happy, too, with clusters of flowers opening atop the Purple Peruvian plants:



They even have purple veining on the leaves, though it fades to green as the leaves grow. I was hoping for purple flowers, too, but I guess there's only so much purple one plant can produce.

Last, of course, is the so-far-lovely tomato cage:



Twenty tomato plants and three tomatillos. (They're the three smallish plants nearest to the camera. More sensitive to cold weather, they transplanted later than tomatoes.) They don't look like all that much now, but the Stupice are flowering, and the rest have flower clusters about ready to pop. In fact, they might have already; the rain's keeping me inside.

So far, it's been an effective deterrent to critters of all sorts. There's no roof above, and the crossbars are about six feet up, so I can open up the "gate"² and walk through unimpeded. I train the tomatoes to strings running down from the support beams, carefully removing unwanted suckers - one per plant's nice, and the occasional extra isn't a problem - and by midsummer, I'll be walking in a corridor of tomato greenery and fruits. With a little luck, of course.

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¹We're not done picking for this year. But it's slowing down considerably. Peak picking, going out every other day: a dozen quarts. Yesterday was a mere seven.

²Extra netting attached to a length of conduit that's tied into place, so it's like the cheapest, laziest door ever built.

So many strawberries.

Lewisburg.

Last year, I filled a garden bed with strawberry plants.¹ After removing the flowers and letting them send out as many runners as they liked, we now have a bed that's fully packed with them. And with all those plants come an amazing quantity of ripe, delicious strawberries.

I picked the first quart about a week and a half ago, after working to remove the protective netting and yank the weeds. Every other day or so, it was time to pick again, until we ended up with this for yesterday's picking:



Nine quarts, which brings the total for the season to seventeen. These nine, it's worth noting, were those that had ripened since we'd picked on Friday, two days earlier. Strawberry season is officially in full force.

In addition to devouring them fresh, we've been doing what we can to limit the number taking up fridge space by preserving them.

Strawberry-rhubarb jam? Check. Straight strawberry's going to be the next batch - quite possibly tomorrow, given the rate at which the plants are producing.

Dried strawberries? Check. Especially good in scones; their flavor really seems to sing in baked goods.

Strawberry ratafia? Check. I'm planning to try a strawberry liqueur shortly, too.

We'll freeze some, too. They're perfect for summer smoothies, especially after coming home following a good run on a hot and humid morning.

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¹I also planted some alpine strawberries, which are doing quite well in their second year, but they're a pleasure of a different sort.