Great Progress and a Snack

Its been a crazy week, but I spent one whole morning in the garden pulling weeds, staking and harvesting.  It was an exciting and bug biting time despite my liberal use of insect spray.  Something wayward did bite my ear, and it still hurts to wear my Bluetooth earpiece.  Ironically, my mother, who helped weed for the first hour, was also bitten on the ear and cannot wear her hearing aid from the swelling.  As a result, she has been unable to hear me complain additionally about the mosquito infestation.
I have attached a big wad of photos of the garden's progress post partial weeding.  I was most excited about the first harvest of beans and have already taken a second batch since the photo taken on Tuesday.  A Japanese eggplant has also been harvested since the pics.  The leaves in the bag are sweet potato leaves, and I am told by my mother that they are quite tasty sauteed like greens.  And I am stunned that we have corn growing!!  My doubting Thomas days are over, and I hope that they grow nice and fat, so that we will have some sweet juicy corn for summer cookouts.

At our front and side yard garden, the zucchini flower continue to grow, but I have no squash.  I have no idea what is wrong.  Anyone with any idea, please contribute to my learning process.  The dill has completely taken over and I have taken to ripping out entire plants to save space for the basil and rosemary that are just coming up to speed.  Below, I have a picture of my latest dill creation - gravalax, or as my daughter calls it, fish ham.  Gravalax is the heavenly combination of sugar/salt cured fresh Pacific salmon with peppercorn, dill, juniper, and a little fennel.  Actually, I didn't have any juniper berries so I cheated with my next best substitute - Hendrick's gin.  3 days under a brick, and this is what you get!  Jon is currently at the grocery store procuring bagels for tomorrow morning's breakfast feast. 

Well, I'm off to heat up the repairs from my roasted chicken fiasco from 2 nights ago.  Everyone have a great weekend!

And Down Comes the Rain

Woohoo!  There have been fantastic rains followed by nice periods of bright sun for 2 weeks.  The garden is prospering for the most part, and I am stoked!  I have lots of great pics to share with you.  Check out the corn!  Wow is all I can say.  I am pretty impressed - especially with the fact that this has taken very little effort up to this point.  We are even doing a great job of feeding the birds and squirrels our ripened strawberries.  Jon built a chicken wire coop around the berries the other week, and lo and behold, a few days later, we come back to find a spot where the "fence" had been slightly raised and half a giant red strawberry gone.  Really - it went under the coop.  And why did it eat only half the strawberry??  Would it not be more prudent, if you were already stuck under the coop, to go ahead and eat or take the whole thing?  Stupid smart squirrels.

I am thinking, and certain people are telling me, that we got too late a start on the sugar snap peas.  That is the plot that we worked the least, so the weeds seem to out number the plants about 50:1 right now.
So, what do you think, anyone?  Do we try to let it ride or rip them out and wait for late summer to start working on some fall tasties?  I was thinking about some bok choi or this Chinese spinach like thing called Gai Lan.  I'd love to hear some other ideas.

But back to the gardening.  You will see, I have a lot of dill coming out.  I had 4 plants last year, and it just seeded like crazy!  The basil did not seed as aggressively, but I still have about 6 or 7 little beauties coming out in the plot in our front yard.  I'm already thinking about some homemade pickles and gravalax and salmon with dill cream, . . . and I have no idea what else I can do with dill.  Perhaps dill zucchini, because that is the first veg I see coming.  So beautiful.  I can't wait.