In the Garden and Down the Lane

The weather has finally turned hot and the plots 'n pots in the community garden are doing very well. Some people had help planting their plots, and you know that good help is hard to find these days!

Things are springing out of the ground, and while some of us have had a critter snacking on the plants in our sites at night, so far (knock wood) no critters have eaten anything out of the community garden.

I have promised to make up a sign, as everyone who passes by wants to know what exactly is going on. You'd think they'd never seen a farm before!

As far as gardens around the park go, any number of people report that they have big fat buds on their tomato plants. My Brandywines have flowers! It seems that everyone's tomatoes are doing really well. And there are radishes, carrots, lettuce, beans, peas and other assorted veggies coming up from seed, and the "starts" are doing equally well. We're going to all have to eat a lot of squash if all these squash plants we've planted produce as well as they usually do! There are lots of cukes, strawberries and cabbages around as well.

We have already harvested several meals of greens, including bok choi and Chinese kale. I'll be planting my second crop of Asian greens in a day or two, and in this kind of weather they are often ready for harvest within three weeks!

The flowers in the park are just spectacular this year, so last evening I did a flower tour with the camera, and will share the pictures with you. I have a bunch, so I put most of them on Flickr. To see them click here.

But one I will put here is a picture of Judy and Annabelle's purple clematis. To describe these as spectacular is doing them a disservice. Breathtaking is more like it. I've never seen such enormous blossoms on a clematis. The only one I ever got to bloom had one pitiful quarter-sized bloom. These are almost the size of dinner plates! Well, the old-fashioned 10" dinner plates, like we had when I was a kid and everything was "regular" size and not super-sized, including dinner plates.