My Mother’s Vegetable Garden

This year my mother decided to put in some raised beds out on the south side of the house, where there’s enough sun to grow vegetables.  Thanks to her hard work and one of the sunniest Olympia summers on record, her beds are positively overflowing with produce: From left to right, she is growing salad [...]

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Spring Round-Up: What Worked, What Didn’t

It’s almost June, and I can now make some assessments of the spring crops. There are some things that I’ll grow more of next year, and some things that don’t seem worth planting again. Radishes: The regular radishes were great, especially when they were small. I didn’t care for radishes before this, but these were [...]

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Salad Suggestion: Add Strawberries

Last week The Arugula Files posted about a delicious-sounding salad with arugula, strawberries, and feta with a red wine vinaigrette.  Both visually and taste-wise, strawberries really do make a great addition to salads.  Their sweet, tart flavor is a  pleasing contrast to both mild and bitter salad greens, and they also pair well with other [...]

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Meager Harvests, Mystery Strawberries

I stopped by my plot on Tuesday after work to do a little weeding and watering.  I also thought there would be some strawberries and peas to pick.  While I wasn’t totally wrong, the harvest was beyond meager: Oh well.  At least there’s still copious salad greens.  Hopefully the next few days of sunshine will [...]

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This Week’s Harvests

I made an extremely brief stop by the garden last night to gather some greens.  The cut-and-come-again method is really working on the lettuces.  I cut them down last weekend, leaving only an inch and a half at the base, and three days later the centers are already growing new leaves. This week also marks [...]

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After the deluge, pea blossoms

After reading Ed Bruske’s post the other day about rain washing away seedlings such as eggplants and tomatoes, I started to get nervous.  Then on Wednesday late night, as I listened to the rain pounded outside, I saw this on weather.com’s radar map: That whole line of red marched northeast right across DC in the [...]

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