Dana's Garden

We’re in for a very dry week in Charlottesville.  Low- to mid-90s every day and only 10-20% chance of rain until next Tuesday.

This presents an inconvenience for us, since we currently have an empty rain barrel and no system of catching rain, if there was any to fall.  The other problem is that, during my move a couple weeks ago, we mistook our black garbage bag of water jugs for trash, so they all got dumped.   A fresh bunch of jugs from Food Lion is now in our possession, so with that, we were able to water the garden tonight.

We really need to build a rain-catching system next year.  I’m getting tired of hauling jugs around.

On a positive note, we had a huge harvest yesterday!  Here’s the spread:

Nasturtiums, radishes, green beans, sugar snap peas, lettuce, jalapeno, cilantro!

We cooked the green beans as our side with our burgers, and everything else went into a nice salad:

Pretty, and all edible (yes, even the flowers)!  A variety of flavors here:  the nasturtiums lend a peppery taste, peas are sweet, radishes a little hot.

Speaking of “hot”…yesterday was a scorcher.  Somehow we believed that it would actually be cool in the morning, if we got up and started working in the garden around 8 am.  Hahahaha.  Yeah.  It was already 85 degrees by then.  I got burned on my back pretty bad.  Looked into the poison ivy Kurt’s been telling me about, in the corner of the plot where nothing is really growing right now.  Kurt is extremely allergic to poison ivy (like, a trip to the hospital kind of allergic), and it’s never affected me before (despite many years of childhood spent playing outside and probably frolicking through it), so guess who had to clean it up.  I uprooted it with the shovel, probably took about 10 minutes.  Not a big deal.  Wore long sleeves and pants, threw those things in a bag and then straight into the washing machine when I got home.  Took off the gloves I was wearing immediately and used another pair (going to steer clear of the other ones for awhile).

Despite the heat, we got a lot of work done.  Lots of weeding done…the thicket that is the right side of our garden is now clear thanks to Kurt!  Plant rows are nice and tidy now.  The rest of the landscaping cloth is laid down now, so we have nice pathways to everything.

I also got a replacement for the blackberry plant that Kurt accidentally dug up the other day.  (He tried to put it back, but the whole thing turned brown.  It happens.)

Tonight after watering, we picked a whole bag of green beans, with plenty left on the plants.  That felt pretty good.   I also made some pico de gallo using the jalapeno and cilantro picked yesterday.  Put it on top of some shrimp and rice and was so tasty!  (Recipe here:  http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pico-De-Gallo/Detail.aspx).

So, progress continues, and things are coming along nicely.  I think we’re both pretty pleasantly surprised with the strides the garden has taken.  Everything started out so small and it was kind of all up in the air.  Now, we have something we can be proud of.  And all of this from starting with a plot of land that was halfway underwater.

Bon appetit!

Dana