Please Send Salad Dressing

Our Buttercrunch and Black Seeded Simpson lettuce is delicious, but it's not very heat tolerant. This past week of 100 degree weather came close to doing it in, so today we harvested everything that was getting ready to bolt. Now we have about six gallons of lettuce.


Needless to say, we'll be foisting this on everyone we see.

Shady Grove

Not too long ago we erected a sunshade to protect the bed of greens and peas. When the rest of the garden fills in we won't have a need for the contraption, but for now the high-noon sun is just a bit too much.

The set up really is as easy as it looks; we just tied a sheet to one end of the fence and ran a line from the corners of the opposite end of the sheet to the fence on the other side. The string running on the left side of the photo is attached to the fence with loops as opposed to tying it on. The loops allow us to slide the string on and off the fence posts so we can pull the shade back on cloudy days.

Food!

Let the record show that this, the fourth weekend of April, 2008, marks the first time this year that we ate actual food from our garden.

This lettuce was planted last fall and survived the winter with only a couple of frostbitten outer leaves. Due to the lack of an appropriate harvest basket we jammed it into this coffee mug. It (the lettuce, not the mug) made an excellent salad for dinner last night.


This garlic was planted a year and a half ago, got swallowed whole by weeds and never harvested, and re-emerged this spring as a million little clusters of green garlic. Some of it made an appearance in our soup tonight, and the rest will be pesto by tomorrow evening.