Garden salads

Today, we had one of our first salads from our garden. We had snap peas (who knew just how quickly they turn from flower to pea), pea leaves, lettuce leaves, arugula and cilantro. All from our polyculture garden. I am amazed about the peas. Yesterday it seems like they all started to bloom at once, and I didn't see a single ripe pea. Today, when I went out to harvest some of lettuce, there were peas all over the bush. Now the peas were very small, and really should not have been eaten today, but I couldn't resist and neither could Mateo later in the afternoon.

After trying the square foot method last year, and really not getting much of a harvest at all, I am really enjoying the polyculture method. It is so fun to look and see all of the plants intermingled together and the larger bush beans giving some needed shade to the young lettuce plants and other new starts. I can't wait to get to eat more salads from our garden. And it is densely packed enough, that I have had to do very little weeding. It turns out that little chaos is a very good thing in a garden.

Other new in our garden: Mateo ate the first red ripe strawberry of the season yesterday. He was quite patient in waiting for it to become ripe, and popped it into his mouth the minute it turned red.

The last piece of garden news is that we are growing cucumbers and tomatoes in pots that allow them to cascade down. We shall see how this works, but I love the ideas of red sweet tomatoes and little cucumbers cascading off of our porch.