Our garden.

This is our spring garden and it’s right outside our door. Which makes it very handy for the things we like fresh to prepare yummy meals, like lettuce and herbs. It’s in the shade close to half of the time, so it is good for our springtime vegetables that are still holding on because they have had no clue, until recently, that summer is already here. I too am a little confused about Oregon’s mild and rainy climate. It’s becoming more and more apparent that I have only ever gardened in desert climates. I have been fussing for months about the summer garden being delayed by rain. Not to mention angry when people laughed at my naive notion to plant in April. THEM: Ha! We don’t plant until June. ME: VWHHHATT?? What about my tomatoes and my squash and my peppers? I need to get my leeks in the ground and my carrots! If the green beans aren’t in the ground soon they’ll never be enough time for maturity before the first frost. Is the ground a little less muddy today? What’s the forecast say? Maybe two days of sunshine in a row this week will be enough…Why won’t this ground just dry out for a few days so I can sink my shovel in?!!!… I’m never going to be able to do anything, ever. ITS NOT FAIR!! *Lots of stomping* THEM: “Have patience child.” Why is everyone so wise here? Anyways, that’s what they tell me and so I listen, and I’m over it and I think we (the vegetables and I) will be okay. This garden has fed us well already and made up for early tomatoes.

We are harvesting snap peas now and freezing them for months of delicious stirfrys. I plan to re-plant more in September because apparently, here in Oregon you can have two crops of snap peas a year. Blows my mind. They are so fantastically delicious and useful. Raine and lime can often be spotted lingering by their vines munching on their sweet green perfection. Hard to resist!

Probably what has surprised me the most so far– the lettuce. Who knew it was so easy to grow? It’s a cool weather thing I guess. I just bought a few different types of loose leaf lettuce seed packets from a company I trusted, mixed them together, and plant a short row of seeds every few weeks. I barely thin the seedlings and when they get big enough, I move them to where we have already harvested another. Now we have a plentiful variety of lettuce growing out our ears. It’s a beautiful thing. Why? Because fresh, right-out-of-the-garden-5-minutes-ago lettuce, is crispier and more flavorful. I hope to become a connoisseur of lettuce flavors after a few years of experimenting with different varieties. Red sails are my favorite (the spotted red ones) so far. They taste like iceberg and romaine had a spotted baby…a crunchy, refreshing little baby without any bitterness. Yum.

 And yep, we have another garden, our summer garden, that is about 3x’s the size of this one at a local community garden. More on that soon.