The roses are blooming, all lush and lovely.  The pale pink one is David Austin’s “Queen of Sweden”, the dark one is “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”.  One of these days I really must set up an arbor for Tess to climb.

We’re eating a lot from the garden these days, lots of salads and cooking greens, baby beets.  We just finished up the last of the garlic scapes and we gather around a quart of peas, snow and snap, every morning to eat with whatever we happen to be having for breakfast.  So far the strawberries have been a disappointment.  It’s exciting when we can each get one in a day, instead of having to cut them up to share.  You would think there would be more to show from over a hundred plants.  I blame the rain.  The raspberries are running amok and a new bed is underway for all of the canes showing up in between rows of parsnips and in the middle of paths.

We’ve heard that the seed pods from radishes make a tasty snack.  Has anyone ever tried them?  We have two small patches that we’ve let go to seed.  I’ll let you know how the experiment goes!

The weather…ugh.  We’ve had rain, rain and more rain.  I can’t even remember the last time we watered.  It was fine for a while, but now I find myself getting grumpy when I make my plans in the evening for working in the garden, only to wake up to a torrential downpour.  The wood chip path through the center of the kitchen garden has been washed into a big heap at the end.  Part of a bed flooded and washed away and there are now little kale and lettuce plants going, lemming like, over a cliff.  Even so it wasn’t all that bad, until there were several days in a row when we couldn’t go out at all.  We finally emerged to find vast quantities of over-whelming weeds and an insane number of mosquitoes.  We’re outdoorsy people, used to living in the woods.  People come to visit us and go home cranky because they got “bit to death”, and we don’t even notice.  But this?  This is unbearable.  I’ll run outside for approximately 2 minute intervals.  My last time out I ran the side of a hand trowel through the earth in a straight line, dropped in a handful of turnip seed, covered it up and grabbed a handful of peas, far fewer then a meant to, before I just. could. not. take. it. any. more.  I’m not sure I want to go see fireworks tomorrow night.  I think I might rather stay inside where there are only a couple hundred mosquitoes.  They are so thick outside that we bring them in with us on our clothes and in our hair.  I think this might be the first year ever that we watch the display from the car.  bah. ick. pah.