radishes – Dear Liza

Dear Liza,

All this crazy June sunshine has sure woken up my veggie allotment at Blair Community Garden! The main challenge now is keeping everything wet enough.

The legacy strawberries that grow at the edge of my allotment have made a lovely snack for me.

My row of radishes, started from seed on May 19, have finally started getting fat. For more than a month they have just been sitting there; not dead, but not thriving, either. Now the row is filling up and looking like a tiny red forest.

Bizarrely, the lettuce seeds I put in just six days ago are already sticking their heads up!

The organic cherry tomato transplants are taller than their cages and some have tiny yellow blossoms.

And my catnip is growing like mad, creating the delightful problem of having too much cat-druggy goodness for Mouse to share with Maggie, Hopey, BK, Ash, Richard and Doug, and all our other kitten friends.

Summer has arrived! All I can do now is chase it until fall.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Dear Liza,

I stopped by the garden plot yesterday, to pull tiny weeds and remove the camellia blossoms. I noticed that some of the radishes were looking weird… the soil around the leaves was lumpy and tilted.

And then I saw why!! Some of them have actual radishes below the leaves. Taking a clue from my friend Shawn Quione in Salinas, I chose the biggest ones to thin out, so the others would have more room. Each one was about the size of the end of my thumb.

Once I got them home, I washed them gently and put them away like fine jewelry, to have with supper. And while I was waiting for Auntie Bridgett to get home, I celebrated with a portrait of the harvest. It is my favorite page in my garden journal so far.

I know it is only May, and summer goes until September, but I don’t know if I will be as excited about anything I pull from my dirt as I am about these four radishes. The newness of this sort of creation is just wonderful.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Tag: radishes

Veggie Garden Update

First Harvest