heaven condensed

June 20, 2013

Of all the places I want to be right now, and no other place, is our back garden.  Everything is looking extra pretty, the first flush of spring is long gone but the promise of summer is just a few days away.  Summer!  I love the way summer looks in our garden with bright spots of color, mostly pink, in every corner, and veggies growing like crazy.  The sky is blue and there is a little breeze, birds and bees everywhere.  Such a busy, quiet little place. 

Our garden veggies are grown in raised beds with a watering system my husband engineered years ago.  Every spring he spends a few weeks tweaking and repairing the beds and water system and they've held up really well.  We renewed the dirt in the beds last year and keep the soil healthy with compost.  We are completely organic and have been the entire time we've lived here, 27 years.  A well tended garden will, for the most part, stay pretty healthy without having to rely on chemicals.  My husband, now retired, has taken over a lot of the garden chores.  I am still the main weeder and pruner and planter, but he has taken over the watering and the tomatoes.  He gets carried away with tomatoes and so I asked him how many plants we had, "Oh, about 18 or 20".  So last night we went out to count them, 36 tomato plants just for us two people!  Oh dear.

Our green bean patch is not large but this is just from one day's picking!  Green beans are prolific and require picking every other day if not daily.  In our garden, they last for half the growing season.  When they poop out we uproot and replant to get another late summer crop.  Our cherry tomatoes are ripening a small handful a day, we just eat right from the bush while we're standing there.  I love them warm from the sun.  My husband promises we'll start picking slicers in a week.

Today, besides green beans we are harvesting golden beets, red beets, red Italian spring onions, cucumbers, dill and oranges, all for tonight's dinner for 12.  I have a bucket of water in the garden to swirl the just picked veggies to get the initial dirt off, then I put them in the sink for a good wash.  These will get roasted today for a veggie salad for tonight's party.  Come back tomorrow for party pictures (that I hope I get)!

These pictures were taken between 6:30 and 8:30 this morning as the sun was acing out the fog. 

Shasta daisies, a lovely perennial. 

Bigger than a dinner plate!

We have more than 20 hydrangeas, my husbands favorite flower.


Taken around 7am with the fog.

Italian Red Scallions

Golden Beets and Red Jewel

In the sink, today's harvest!

French green filet beans.
An American heirloom tomato, Radiator Charlies Mortgage Lifter.  A popular beefsteak in the states.

The perennial border with annuals at the front, this year pink and purple zinnias and cosmos.



Red Simplicity hedge rose from Jackson Perkin.





So now you know what I'm doing when I'm not knitting!


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5 Comments

  1. Kristin, sometimes I think you should charge admission. I am not a gardener, and I realize it's a labor of love, but still....so beautiful. Chloe

    ReplyDelete
  2. Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter????? How did a tomato get that name?
    I didn't even know we had fog at 7:00 this morning.
    Carole

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beautiful gardens - and a ton of work, I know! I see why you call it 'heaven condensed.' So lovely!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sigh . . . your title says it all!

    ReplyDelete

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