Tomatoes, potatoes, and Tess--all growing!

We've now got about 150 tomato plants, representing about 50 different varieties, in the ground and doing well. The potatoes are also flourishing, have been hilled twice, and are just about ready to have some "new" potatoes plucked gingerly from the soil.

Tess, five months and always growing, still likes hanging out in the garden with us. She'll munch a peapod or two, or some escarole leaves, when she gets the chance. She particularly likes the kitchen compost pile next to the potato bed, but Perry keeps trying to keep her out of it by adding more and more fencing. But Tess, being a Border Collie and therefore smarter than both us put together, always finds a way in...when she's motivated to do so!

When March is wet, seeds will sprout, we bet

Coming from Southern California, 10-week-old Tess was surprised, but not unpleasantly, by our March rain. She also told us that she really likes matching shoes and jackets--Bella's green ones and her own white ones.

The rain has been coaxing all of our recently planted seeds to sprout: second crops of spinach, lettuce, arugula, escarole, bok choi, green onions, and chives, and new crops of fennel, radishes, mint, and two kinds of beets--tri-color and golden beets (which even Rick will eat).

And of course, peas. This year, we went hog-wild with peas. We started with 36 feet of tomato trellises. (The tomatoes will go in after the peas come out.) With 1 vine every 2 inches on both sides of each trellis, that is 432 pea plants and a whole lotta peas. Not content with this, a few later, we put a row of bush-style peas between every pair of trellises, for a total of 180 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. Still not content, a few weeks after that, we lined the edges of our dahlia boxes with double rows of short vines, for a total of 480 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. (Actually, we seem to have left about 2 row feet bare... So make that 468 pea plants.) Those
plants are about 3 inches tall now.



Of course, we did not plant just one kind of peas. It's true that, with the exception of a few row feet, they are all shelling peas.
We just love shelling peas. We especially love the French petit pois, which are packed so snugly, shoulder-to-shoulder in their pods. But we also packed a few other varieties of shelling peas that come in earlier than the petit pois.

With our succession plantings, we figure we will have pea shelling parties every 2 weeks during April and May! Of course, we won't be able to eat all of these peas fresh. We'll freeze most of them for next winter. It is easy to freeze peas--just par-boil them and throw them in a freezer box or bag. And they will be wonderful!

There is another reason to fill empty areas of the winter garden with peas. They are nitrogen-fixing plants. That means that, instead of depleting the soil, as most vegetables do, peas actually improve the soil for the tomatoes and other vegetables that will follow them.

Oh, there is one other kind of peas we planted -- sweet peas. Flowers, that is. We put them in a nice new 6-inch tall box that Perry and Aaron planted along our picnic area. We hung a net down the center of the box so that in the spring we will have a wall of delicately scented sweet peas.

Spinach: the crop that keeps on giving

As we leave February behind and begin March, we thought it appropriate to have a nice dinner of spring lamb chops with a fresh mint/parsley chimichurri, and spinach cooked slowly and briefly with olive oil, garlic, and salt.

The spinach in the garden, planted last September to be ready in time for the traditional spinach gnocchi at Thanksgiving, is still growing and yielding! Here Tess (now 10 weeks old) is "helping" to harvest some spinach for dinner. We just cut off the largest and mature leaves, as many as we need, and keep the plants in place to keep producing...as we have done all fall and winter so far.

In the kitchen, we made some spaghetti carbonara (using guanciale and pecorino, of course), to savor as a first course. Then we moved on to the lamb chops and spinach, shown here. It was a wonderful dinner, and we look forward to many more meals made with garden parsley, mint, and spinach. And, although we now have our border collie Tess to herd sheep, we doubt that we'll be growing our own lamb chops anytime soon!