A Hot Weekend

First I'd like to wish everyone a happy Mother's Day. Tonight my son will be in and tomorrow my daughter is flying in to stay for a couple of months. But Sundays are always Mom's Day here. My two kids, my husband and I all get together for online games together. We play all day. There is never much time for gardening except in the morning. My son doesn't get up until 10am so I've got several hours early on if I need it. And if I can get my butt out the door that early.

Today I did get out. The first chore was to harvest most of the radishes. They were all getting big. I took out all the French Breakfast but left just the White Icicle. I figured I'd plant beans around them. As you can see not many radishes are left. Just a small amount.

A couple of the radishes have been munched by the squirrels I think. The mocking birds haven't been doing a good enough job of chasing them off.

Then I decided to plant the beans, all eight varieties. I filled a whole 4'x16' bed with beans. Most of these are dried beans, but I do have Kentucky Wonder pole and Masai bush for green beans. The Masai is an early bean and I'm hoping will fill the gap before the pole beans start to produce. Then when they are done, I want to plant the same ones again for the fall. The pole beans peter out towards fall after they have produced for months. So I'm looking for a long green bean season.

The northern most side is where the pole beans went along the foot at the back. And the three feet in the front are all the bush beans. Some of the seed was from just buying dried beans at the store. I used Baer's Best Beans since they are a Massachusetts company. I'm just praying they are all bush and not pole beans. But it is hard to imagine even a small farm erecting trellises for pole beans.

Just in case the beans don't make it, I have extra seed of everything except Tiger Eye. If they don't make it I'll plant something else there instead. It is a bit early for the beans. But today it got to 87F so I'm thinking it was a good decision. Though the soil has been getting down to 55F at night which is too cool for beans. But fine in the day at around 60F-65F. With today's brief hot spell, I'm guessing it will get into the 70Fs.

Yesterday was warm too, but not quite as much as today was. This has sent my earliest planted baby choys into bolting. So I harvested all the Shanghai bok choys and much of the tatsoi that I'd thinned earlier in the week. That half of the bed is mostly empty. There is a bit of self seeded dill and lettuce, but not a lot else. I still have the other half of the bed that was planted later (after the abnormal hot weather at the end of March and beginning of April). Those later planted greens have had fabulous greens weather. This is the first bad hot spell they have seen so far. I hope they don't start bolting like the others. As it is I have too many Asian greens in the fridge. I just can't eat them all. Though I do try to eat a lot of them. I had stir fry for lunch (no rice, no meat, just lots of veggies and some cashews) and am thinking about fried rice for dinner. Maybe tomorrow I'll make a slaw.

But the last set of extras was successfully given away. Hopefully this next set will be too. I'm going to give my townhouse mates the first crack at it as I usually do. But if they still have too many greens in their fridge hopefully I'll find someone else that likes them. I've definitely hit over abundance.