Back Yard Garden, June 16

We had a couple of mid-nineties days, and then four days of drenching rains and nighttime temps in the 50s, and even hail. The garden is confused, and I'm not a good enough gardener to know what it needs now. I'm just watching it. Propping up the flattened tomatoes, pruning off the dead leaves and making sure the bottom leaves aren't sitting in the mud. But everything seems to be doing ok. The tomatoes and peppers and eggplants have some hail damage, not as bad as the flowers and salad greens. They are kind of sitting there and not growing, like the cucumbers. But they look healthy, and we are back into hot temperatures this week. The beans are growing, I'm planting new ones where they didn't come up. Behind them are two strips of sunflowers, covered with screens because something keeps digging them up every time I plant them.

Hail-battered beans. The front yard garden and flowers are worse. But it's nothing like what they got in other parts of Colorado. Entire crops are ruined.

Charlie through the peas! You have never seen "alert," until you have lived with a border collie.

I planted these peas the second week of March. I think I thought they would be setting pods before now. But I'm so happy with the delicate flowers and the baby pods. The flower is exquisite, it tastes like a pea. Maybe some year I can find room for a whole field of peas, just to harvest the flowers and not feel guilty that it won't turn into a pod.

Dancing peas.

We have had some beautiful salads from the garden. Walking out the back door while dinner finishes cooking, picking ten kinds of greens and having them on the table five minutes after they're picked . . .that is something I don't think I will ever want to give up.

French Breakfast radishes.

Potatoes, coming along.

They start out in such neat rows. Even after weeding, it's a tangle of peas and lettuces.

Monkey Bars

June is going by so fast. I hope we're able to slow summer down this time. Many days it's been too cold and rainy for the pool, and the first week of June R went to a camp at another Catholic school. Her last day of camp, we took her to a park in Englewood that has a little petting farm and a train.

The train winds around and goes over a river.

The playground has bigger monkey bars than she's used to, and she was eager to try them.

Then she got discouraged because she couldn't hold on. She kept dropping off.
We suggested that she take a breather and play on something else for awhile.

She walked away and said she just wanted "peace and quiet" so she could think about it.

She climbed back up and tried it again.

And she fell down again. But this time she thought it was funny. If you were expecting an inspiring story about how R went back again and again until she mastered the monkey bars . . . this isn't it.

I love my funny little girl.

Grape Leaves

We should have pruned our grapes earlier. But we did finally get to it, and I did something I've been wanting to try for two years. I canned the leaves.

Wash them and trim off the stems . . .

. . . wrap them loosely in bundles . . .

. . . and blanch the little bundles briefly in boiling water. They immediately turn army-green. The blanched leaves all by themselves have a lemony, pickle-y taste, which surprised me. Whenever I've had stuffed grape leaves, I thought that taste came from the brine.

Pack them into pint jars in a salty, lemony brine. A wheelbarrow full of leaves turned into six pint jars of rolled-up leaves. Ready whenever I want to stuff them.

My first batch of dolmades. I made a green pesto with sorrel, some spicy greens from the garden, walnuts and parmesan. I mixed it with brown rice. Each leaf got some rice and pesto, a little dab of goat cheese, and a red pepper sliver. I put them on a plate with grape leaves and more salad from the garden.

This is my favorite time of year, when the peonies and red roses bloom briefly at the same time.

Our new bare-root roses along the driveway are budding. I hope by next year everything will burst into bloom together.

Underneath the roses are a handful of old strawberry plants with these tiny, intensely sweet alpine strawberries. Some day I'll transplant them and add more plants and have a whole strawberry patch. And raspberries, and more fruit trees! One step at a time.