The garden is winding down, with night-time temperatures inching toward the high forties, so I decided to start processing some of the Malabar Spinach that’s growing in several beds. Malabar spinach is a wonderful vining spinach (it’s not really in the spinach family) from India that’s used just like regular spinach. It’s a little bit thicker and has more cellular slime, so it’s best in soups and stir fries than as a fresh garden salad.

Before

This morning I picked roughly 16oz of spinach from the vines, pulled the tough rib from the larger leaves, and started a pot of water to boil for blanching. Above you can see that I had one large pile of leaves spanning about two of my cutting boards across and piled high.

After

After blanching, all of that reduced down to a small pile of green mush. I cut the pile in half, and froze in two 8oz packages. The whole process took about 15 minutes, and I’ll be able to continue using this year’s garden harvest into the winter!

The garden is in full swing right now, doing wonderfully thanks to the well-balanced weather of rain and sun that we’ve had in the mid-atlantic region. My raised brick pond is taking on a more natural look. Pogostemon yatabeanus has reseeded itself all throughout the pond from last year, which was a definite surprise.

I also repotted my Crinum americana, which had become so root-bound that I had a terrible time removing the previous pot and separating the plant. I hope they’ll survive the process, as they are no where near as prolific as they have been in previous years.

Otherwise, the only other plant in the pond are some Mesanthemum sp. Africa that I’m hoping will eventually flower so my friend can try to properly ID it.

Elsewhere in the garden, my vegetable plants are all going strong. I got my sweet potato slips (Georgia Jet variety) in our boxes a few weeks ago, and they’re starting to take off.

Our ground/husk cherries have already provided several handfuls of sweet yellow cherries that my wife and I have snacked on while watering.

Some of our heirloom pepper plants from Seed Savers (highly recommended source for transplants and seeds) have peppers forming, but it’ll still be awhile before we harvest anything.

We’re growing three varieties of eggplant this year: regular, neon purple, and white globe. I been manually picking off the flea beetles to prevent the leaves from getting too much damage, and in return all three plants have begun to set flower so it’s a matter of time before fruit appear.

We have about a dozen different varieties of tomatoes growing this year throughout the garden. My most anticipated variety is Kellogg which was an absolutely phenomenal beef-steak style tomato that we grew last year. It stays bright orange, is pretty firm for a large tomato, and is sweet as can be!

What started as an impulsive buy of a market-pack outside of our organic market has turned in a really nice harvest of collards. Our favorite use has been to use the leaves as a wrap, in place of a soft tortilla. I’ve had to begin manually picking off the hungry green caterpillars that had been deposited on the leaves by white moths that regularly visit, but it hasn’t gotten too bad yet.

We did have an excellent harvest of white icicle and red radishes, where we ate more of the radish greens than we did the tuber. In their place, I’ve planted two varieties of okra that are beginning to pop up in the warmer weather. I still need to thin out the rows a little bit this week.

Our grape vine is going strong with lots of grape clusters formed. I’m debating whether this will be the year that I put up some bird netting to save the grapes for us. The bird netting worked fabulously for our strawberries this year, but I do worry about having birds and other critters getting trapped in the fabric.

We eat a lot of greens, and this year, we’re trying a new one in our garden: Strawberry Spinach (above). This plant should eventually produce stalks of red little berry clusters, but the leaves are suitable replacements for spinach, and tolerate the heat a bit better.

The peas are trellising and starting to produce pods. I doubt we’ll have enough to make any substantial pea dish, but they’re another nice treat in the garden. Malabar spinach is planted beneath the peas, so as the hot weather approaches, that red vine will overtake the peas on the support lines, and we’ll have lots and lots of greens for cooking dishes.

We’ve also planted kohlrabi for the first time ever. It looks a little leggy to me where it’s planted, but hopefully it’ll form that alien shaped base as the summer moves along.

Did I mention that we love greens? Our rainbow chard has been prolific, producing seemingly new big leaves every day for harvest. There’s nothing quite like walking out back to harvest dinner!

Finally, we’ve been experimenting with these terra-cotta “Plant Nanny” spikes in several of our containers. I try to water regularly, but containers often seem to dry out on our patio unless they’re watered twice a day. With these spikes, water is absorbed through the terra cotta into the soil as the soil dries out. For medium pots that only have a single plant in them, they seem to work pretty well. Larger areas, like shown above, would probably need several spikes to make any kind of a noticeable impact.

Every spring, one of the things I most anticipate is the blooming of our tiger lilies. These flowers are so fragrant, and so beautiful, that they attract both people and critters alike to them. One of the all-time-favorite photos that I’ve taken happens to revolve around the lily as well (below).

This year, I decided to go out and take a few more pictures that might complement the above photograph.

Fortunately, there’s always lots of ants on the lily flowers, so I didn’t have to wait long before snapping a few pictures.

These are all sugar ants, shot with a Canon MP-E 65mm 1X-5X lens at various magnification levels. I was using a twin flash + diffusers to light the critters.

I love how macro can open up an entire other world to photograph without having to travel great distances. The picture below looks like it could be taking place on another planet.

Now, of course, every good extra-planetary story has to have a villain, so enter the spider mites Homopterans, which unfortunately, are also taking up residence on the lilies.

These tiny insects have a cotton poof coming from their rear, that looks like might it be full of eggs.

These guys would scurry to the other side of the stamen whenever I tried to get a shot, so I had to do the awkward maneuver of holding the camera in place, while using my other hand to shew the mite back toward the lens.

I suppose I ought to try to get rid of these critters to keep them from damaging the plants. Any suggestions on organically killing them?

I also found a lightning bug taking shelter at the base of one of the flowers. There seem to be less lightning bugs today than there were when I was growing up, which I’ve read may be due to light pollution at night.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my photographs! In a week or so, the flowers will be gone, and I’ll have to wait until next year to see what critters the lilies attract.

I’d like to share a few photos that I snapped while I was outside in the garden today. The garden itself is really starting to take off with the warmer weather that we’ve been having lately. I have a number of volunteer tomato plants that came up from an heirloom assortment I grew last year. I’m sure they’ve hybridized now, but the outcomes have produced some very unique looking flowers (below).

I’ve planted Nasturtium throughout the garden as a pest deterrent, and a wonderful peppery addition to salads. The Nasturtium leaf reminds me an awful lot of pennywort in our aquarium.

I’m also beginning to put some of my aquarium plants outside in the pond to grow for the summer. Already, at least four frogs have taken up residence in our small watering hole; more than in any previous year. That’s okay with me, however, as they certainly bring more intrigue to the backyard.

We’ve been picking a huge amount of lettuce greens from the garden. We have 8-9 different varieties, so our salad plates have been very full and tasty. In combination with a handful of strawberries, we’ve loved our early harvest.

On Monday, our first tiger lily flowers opened up, revealing one of my most anticipated photo subjects each year. The colors that these flowers exhibit is nothing short of breathtaking. Even the unopened pods are pretty with striking orange colors.

I’ve been spending some time picking the flowers off of our thyme plants in order to encourage them to keep producing more leaves. The small purplish white flowers are abundant and fast replenishing after every picking.

The pea vines are now several feet tall and producing the first pods of the season. The white flowers are a nice precursor to what I hope will be a plentiful yield of peas this year.

Finally, it looks like our spinach season is over before it really even began. I got the spinach seeds in the ground too late this spring, so we only managed to snag a few flavorful leaves before the plants began to bolt from heat. I will replant in the fall, and try to overwinter them for a great harvest next year. I also have some warm-weather spinach in the ground now, which I hope will soon satisfy our spinach fix.

I would love to hear how everyone else’s gardens are progressing. Please feel free to leave a note in the comment section.

Spring is one of my favorite times of the year, with the cold weather slowly being replaced with the warm, the greening of the trees, and of course the start of the gardening season. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my backyard tilling soil, mixing in compost, and otherwise prepping my beds.

I’ve also sowed several seeds a few weeks ago, which are now beginning to spring to life. I got the Spinach in a little bit late, but the first real leaves are beginning to show up on my plants. Other gardeners have told me that I should sow Spinach seeds in the fall to have an even earlier crop. That’s on my to-do list for this fall.

Our chives are always one of the first things to pop up in the spring, and now they’re fully grown in. Our oregano, tarragon, mint, thyme, and sage have also sprung back to life from the winter. Unfortunately, 3 feet of snow seemed to kill our rosemary, so we’ll have to replace that soon.

I’ve sowed the seeds for a couple of root vegetables, Dragon Carrots (purple carrots) and beets. Both are popping up and starting their growth. I also have some swiss chard and several lettuces in the ground.

After planting our small strawberry patch 3 years ago, I’m hopefully that this year will finally be the year we have a decent harvest. The plants all look very healthy, with a lot of flowers. Since we do only have a small area dedicated to them, I need to cover them with some bird netting, as I believe the birds were the main consumers of the berries last year.

I love watching our vines spring back up after reseeding themselves from the previous year. Yesterday, I spotted the first string bean shoot emerging from the soil, and our snap peas (pictured above) started popping up a couple weeks ago. I put a couple cucumber and squash plants in the ground to try and get an early start on them, covering the plants at night, but it’s still too cool for them to really take off it seems. Either way, it’s so exciting to be out in the garden, watching for new surprises everyday. The only downside: my aquariums suffer from a bit of neglect. I’d love to hear what you’re planting in the comments section!