Viewing Our Land

Those (above) are blossoms on one of our potato plants. I’m very excited about our potatoes this year – several varieties and they’re growing well.

I’m posting the pictures I took this morning as Bill and I walked around the yard and looked at what’s growing. We do this on weekend mornings right now, and once school lets out, it will become part of our nearly-daily morning routine.

I like this time. This routine. I like the early part of the day anyway, because at that point I’ve still got the whole rest of the day sprawling out ahead of me. Plenty of time to do all the things I need or want to do.

But it’s especially nice just to have a little quiet time with my husband. We walk around the dew-soaked grass, mugs of coffee in hand, and inspect the gardens. The kids are usually either still asleep or half asleep and watching tv at that point. In the summer sometimes one of them will be particularly perky and decide to come out and join us. Call us selfish, but we try to discourage this behavior. We don’t go out much, and these mornings are kind of our version of “date night.”

It sort of makes me think of that song “Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley.” I remember singing that in Kindergarten, and lately it’s been bugging me because I couldn’t remember the lyrics exactly. So – yay internet – I looked it up.

And you know, I have a big problem with the lyrics.

Here’s the first two verses:

Oats, peas, beans and barley grow

Oats, peas, beans and barley grow

Can you or I or anyone know

How oats, peas, beans and barley grow?

First the farmer sows his seed

Stands erect and takes his ease

He stamps his foot and claps his hands

And turns around to view his lands.

The song continues on with the farmer, in subsequent verses, watering, hoeing (the weeds) and harvesting everything.

But…well…we do that. We sow seed, water, weed and harvest.

But I don’t recall ever seeing Bill stamping his foot or clapping his hands during the process.

Is this some crucial part of farming we’ve been neglecting? Will we have better a better yield with the stamping and clapping?

Just one of those things that floats around my brain sometimes. It probably explains why I don’t post often enough.

Anyway.

We’ve got a LOT of tomato seedlings. And I’m not talking about the ones we planted, either.

These are seedlings that just show up, or “volunteer” throughout the gardens. The seeds were either in the compost, or were dropped last season in the form of rotted tomatoes that fell to the dirt and were just left there to break down.

Most of them are Yellow Pear, but some look like Brandywines. So we let them grow and then either find places to plant them (especially the Brandywine) or give them away. We have a hard time just weeding them out. They’re tomatoes – we love our tomatoes here.

Anyway, they’ve also popped up in and around our garlic.

It makes me think of pizza. We just need to toss in a few basil plants and some oregano and we could call it a pizza garden.

Anyway, the garlic will get pulled within the month and the tomatoes will have more room to grow. We always feel good when we can use garden space for multiple things like that.

We’re also growing Nasturtiums again. You can see one of the plants way over on the lower right side of the picture above. Nasturtiums are flowering plants that are edible – the leaves are kind of peppery, like arugula or mustard greens. We grew them years ago but for whatever reason haven’t grown them recently. Until now. These, I think, will have red flowers. Pretty and edible – kind of a two for one special.

Speaking of pretty…

The first of our miniature pink roses. I love these – they’re small, compact, with a ton of petals. And they tend to stay relatively compact through the whole blooming period. You know how some roses fall open more and more as they go, and finally the petals begin to flop down or fall off, and they don’t look so pretty any more? These don’t do that.

And, of course, no early stroll through the garden would be complete (for me, anyway) without some dewdrop shots. The flowers in these next pictures are the pink peonies in our front yard. Pretty flowers, though I still like the white ones best.