Edamame-cide

…One to die and one to grow.

Have I ever mentioned that gardening can be a very frustrating hobby? Just look at this poor Edamame soy bean sprout! I forgot to put their little plastic covers back over them last night after I watered and every last beautiful soy bean sprout was slaughtered in the night. Or, most likely, in the very early morning by the crows.

Why do they do this? They don’t eat the sprouts. They just tear them out of the ground and bite them so they can’t grow! Don’t they know the rule in the Dirt to Dinner garden is, “You kill it–you eat it?” (Let me know if you have any good recipes that call for crow. We’ll talk.)

Heart of the Artichoke

Not only that, but some time after I took this picture this morning, the artichoke plant these blooms are on fell over, for no apparent reason, into the pea patch next door! I am about to go out there and prop it up with some bamboo poles and a trellis net.

Let me assure you, the plants do not look this way in the gardening catalog! Maybe this is the real reason that people don’t generally grow their vegetable gardens in the front yard. At least when you put the garden in the back and the plants are strung up with bailing wire, no one sees them but you!

Four-Foot Snap Peas?

I would just clip off the artichokes and cut the whole plant back to the ground and let it start over next year, but this is a picture of the last plants I ‘gave up’ on.

This is a patch of Sugar Snap peas I planted during a warm spell on January 18th from starts I picked up when I bought the broccoli.

They immediately had all their tops snipped off by some pestilent critter and I thought they were all goners. But they fooled me. They grew back from the roots again! Each plant sent up a new shoot from underground and now they are happily climbing the supports we set out for them.

I’m sure they could have grown a lot faster, had they not had their heads chopped off a week after I planted them, but they are flowering and getting ready to make peas at the same time as the February planting of the Picolo Provenzale peas in the front.