Three Stages of Life in the Garden

The first thing is asparagus.  We planted some asparagus over a decade ago.  What a faithful producer.  Each year it comes up and we snap the spears off and eat them.  I know where they pop up so I generally just plant around them.  This year, they'll share space with Roma II Italian Snap Beans.

We snap them off at the base.  They make a delightful snap.

This young one popping up reminds me of "Junior Asparagus" from the VeggieTales cartoons that the kids used to watch when they were much younger.

So we have lots of items popping up in the garden.  We also have crops finishing up.  Here are some broccoli that are flowering.  We picked pounds of florets.  Finally, we let them go to flower.  The honeybees are really enjoying them.  I'm letting the broccoli go to seed.  I'll harvest the seed pods as they mature and save seeds for this fall planting.

You can also see the cabbage that's maturing.

As it warms, the snails really like to get in the broccoli.  Tricia asked if I could hurry and pick all the cabbage remaining and store them in a box in the fridge.  So I harvested all the cabbage.  I needed that room to plant zucchini squash anyway.

I heard the food processor whirring in the kitchen and stepped in just in time to see Tricia chopping up some of the cabbage and mixing with whey and salt to make a couple of quarts of homemade Sauer kraut.

Sure looks good.  She'll leave at room temperature for a couple of days and then will put them in the fridge.  Then we will put in the fridge.  The flavor gets better as time passes on.

More on the garden coming up in future posts...