Must Get More Peonies
I love peonies, simply love them. In my Ohio garden I have 15-20 different varieties of peonies and they produced quite a show in the early summer. Last year I purchased two new peonies for my garden here, but I’m definitely in need of a few more.
I brought a couple of these beauties with me and I still need to get a start of my grandma’s heirloom peony from my mom. I’m slowly adding peonies to my garden once again, I can’t wait to have them dotting the flowerbeds. ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ is definitely one of my favorites, I got one for this garden last year.
Do you have any peonies in your garden?
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Seasonal Eating
One of the things I love about having an edible garden is the changes in our diet throughout the season. Spring dinner plates are filled with salads of leafy greens. When the weather turns hot and dry, the lettuce starts to bolt and get bitter. There’s never a lack of green on our plates, just as the lettuce is going by, the other summer vegetables are coming into full swing.
There are just a few spears of asparagus left to pair with garlic scapes, sugar snap peas, broccoli, summer squash and other vegetables. Stir fries become our main meals, filled with whatever is ready to harvest and paired with some kind of meat from the freezer, or local seafood. Here’s my recipe for Ginger Beef Stir Fry if you’re interested.
Having a vegetable garden, not matter how small, is a great way to get in touch with seasonal eating. You learn how good vegetables can be when harvested at the height of their maturity and eaten straight away. Vegetables at the grocery store don’t even compare to the ones you get from your own garden.
As much as I love salad, I’m excited to move on to summer vegetables. Broccoli and sugar snap peas are probably my favorites.
What are you harvesting from your garden this week?
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Growth Spurt
Every year I know it’s going to happen and yet I am amazed as I see it unfold before my eyes. In April and May, the garden growth slowly, at what seems like a snail’s pace. Then, almost overnight, everything is big, lush, blooming, going to seed, and buzzing with life.
The difference between the photos below is a month, only a month. When you think about how slowly things grow from March to April, then from April to May, there isn’t even as much growth during that time as there is in two weeks of June.
The lovely thing about Maine is that we actually have shoulder season when things grow a little more slowly. It’s a nice time to enjoy gardening at a bit of a slower pace for a short time. In Ohio the garden burst forth almost overnight.
If you miss a few days in the garden during June, July, and August, you miss so much. I went away for six days and came back to a completely different garden. That’s the beauty of the garden in summer, there’s always something new, always drastic change, look away and you’ll miss it. Tending a garden means almost daily care, but it’s not drudgery because there is so much happening on a daily basis.
When do you notice the most drastic changes in the garden during the growing season?
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Sweet Harvest
The strawberries are in full swing now, we harvested our first batch on Monday and enjoyed strawberry shortcake for dinner. Unfortunately Mr Chiots is traveling, which means I’m having to do the picking of the berries. It’s also a problem because he’s the big strawberry eater around here.
I picked roughly five gallons of berries yesterday and I didn’t even get the entire patch picked. Guess I’ll be busy hulling and freezing berries.
Since there are so many, I have been giving them to friends and neighbors. Hopefully we still have a week or two of harvesting before the season wanes so Mr Chiots can enjoy his favorite season.
Do you grow strawberries in your garden?
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Trial and Error
If you’ve read here long, you know that I love to grow different varieties of each vegetable. One of the main reasons for that is to discover which varieties do best in my climate and with my soil. Each garden has a different microclimate and the soils can be slightly different, even from your neighbor’s garden. Sometimes, one variety of a vegetable won’t do as well as another. Take my 5×5 Challenge garden this year:
It was planted with two different varieties of spinach on April 13. As you can clearly see, one is going to seed while the other isn’t. The ‘Catalina’ spinach from Renee’s Garden on the right is still going strong, even though they were both seeded at the same time. “Catalina’ has been a favorite spinach of mine for many years, it’s been very successful in my Ohio garden and in my garden here in Maine as well. Because of this I grow it every year, but I also trial other varieties as well.
The other variety I planted was ‘Bloomsdale’ an old variety, that actually does quite well in the garden. Spinach is a little like carrots in that it can be slightly picky about being planted too closely.
It used to be that we had regional varieties of vegetables that were particularly suited to microclimates and geographic areas. Much of those varieties have been lost throughout the years, with a more mobile society and fewer people growing their own food and saving their own seed. We can start developing this knowledge once again, by trying different varieties, talking to local gardeners, and saving seed from open pollinated varieties that do particularly well in our area.
Do you trial different varieties of the same vegetables to find the perfect one for your garden?
