pea shooter

Every so often I burn out on knitting — I think that happens to everyone (unless your alias is Yarn Harlot).
Just-before-summer is a good time to burn out.

In the meantime … there are peas to pick
and vines to train
and raspberries to tend
and glass after glass of ice-cold, minty water to gulp down.

I haven’t forgotten my knitting.

It will keep.

 

“A garden is never as good as it will be next year.”

Memorial Day here in the US might be the Unofficial Start Of Summer, but this Spring has been long and slow and cool enough that some Far Northers — who have had six months of winter — are calling it quits and thinking of moving to Florida. (They’re such a hardy breed, though, it’s difficult to credit the rumors.)

As badly as I feel for people in more northern climes, spring has been lovely ’round here. Usually summer weather comes in around April 15th and stays until October. The trees are changing into “something more comfortable” and we’re still in skimpy shorts, complaining that it’s too damn hot.

It’s been a long growing season, too. I’m a negligent gardener at the best of times. It’s only because gardening is so complicated. Come winter, when the ground is a foot deep in snow and there is no danger of appearing immediately hypocritical, I haul out the companion-gardening books and make schematics and talk about what vegetables I can put up.

… and when it’s time to set out seeds and build cold-frames and cover the little baby plants from “threat of frost”, I totally collapse. TOO MUCH WORK. I end up spending ten times the cost of seeds on plants that are already, you know, alive.

I never cover those either.

Anyway. As usual I got my plants in the ground too late, and as usual I felt terribly guilty about spending all that money on tender peas and delicate lettuces that will never grow large enough to harvest because, come mid-April, the temperature will soar up to 90 degrees and …

photographed after the groundhog and I both ate dinner from it. also lunch.

 Except: it didn’t happen. The nights stayed cool (but not too cool) and the days stayed temperate, with a nice alteration of sunlight and rain (not too much rain. And only a few instances of hail.)

So I’m stuck with the other gardening problem: surplus. Who can eat nine heads of lettuce?! (And what was I thinking?) Don’t let the aerial photograph fool you — that’s a 4×4 raised bed. These are big lettuces. I have two salads a day and don’t go through all of one head, plus they keep growing. The peas summoned the strength of Hercules and pulled apart my sloppy trellis — okay, yeah, I should have built a more sturdy one, but I wasn’t expecting them to grow.

My saving grace is our groundhog. She likes her salads, too.