Garden Party!

Our garden is in full swing. I love going out early on Sat. mornings and trying to see how much we can get done before it gets too hot. No matter what we do that day, at the end of it we always look out over the garden and comment proudly how much better it looks now. We always seem to say it with a touch of wonder, like we didn't really expect a few hours of work to make such a difference. This is as much as I could fit in one photo frame, but it extends off to left more. The trees in the background are all different varieties of apple trees - great for well-rounded pies & sauces.The funny thing is, it's not my backyard! This at my friend's house. A few years ago I wished aloud about having a garden, and she said her's was bigger than she could easily do by herself. So we joined forces and have had a great time gardening together. This year a mutual friend joined us, and we all have fun working together. Our styles of gardening complement each other well, and we seem to all hit the "it's hot and I'm tired" point at the exact same time.

Doesn't the garden look nice? All the lush plants and promises of future harvest. Ironically, our very best-looking plant is our compostatoes. They rooted from some old potatoes we tossed in the compost pile and are doing so well we agreed not to turn the compost pile so the potatoes can keep growing. It's fun, more like a science experiment than gardening. No idea what variety of potato it is (I'm hoping garnet sweet potato!). It's heartening in a way to know our compost pile is doing well enough to support potato plants. Since it's open-air I always wonder if the veggie scraps are really turning into compost, or is it just a buffet for the local wildlife? The chipmunks are certainly out in force already. They love our strawberries, and we all got to sample the nearly ripe berries yesterday because the few red ones we saw had chipmunk bites taken out of them. They were warm from the sun, and a mouth-watering mix of future sweetness and not-quite-ripe tartness. If it's anything like last year we are going to have more strawberries than we can conceivably use, even split 3 ways.