Yesterday we spent some time in the sunshine, getting things done in the garden. I brought our camera along so I could show you a few things that are growing out there right now. 

 ::Peas::

They are growing along the back fence. Bracken loves checking for peas every day. We like them sauteed. 

It came up from last year, along the greenhouse. Bracken likes to pick the little flowers and put them in our sun teas.

 ::Garlic::

Won’t be long now before we harvest them!

 ::Kale::

We always let some kale go to seed every year so we will have plenty of our own kale seed. It starts out covered in pretty little yellow flowers and then turns into pods (in the first two pictures.) The pods fill up with seeds and before we know it, we have more seed than we’ll need. 

(Which is why we made them available in the shop.)

Thankfully, Jeff planted lots of lettuce. Most years he plants it regularly throughout the season, so we can have our own fresh lettuce for as long as possible. We love to eat a salad for lunch every day.

 ::Strawberries::

We’ve been having strawberries to eat in our garden every day. All the ones that are ripe get eaten right away, before a picture can be taken. All the ones that get pecked by birds or partially gobbled by slugs, go to the chickens.

 Starts in the greenhouse. Our squash and cucumbers will need to be planted in the ground soon. 

We love summer squash. We planted some yellow crookneck squash too.

I think Jeff planted somewhere around ten varieties of cucumbers this year. He loves them and got very excited about trying many new kinds. 

 ::Zucchini::

 Years past we’ve had more zucchini than we could eat (typical story.) But then we had a year it didn’t grow so well (the seed had terrible germination) and we didn’t take zucchini for granted after that. Not having much of it, made us miss it terribly. We seem to consume more vegetables each year and don’t seem to have as much leftover zucchini, we eat it all up.

 The yarrow gets used in our Magical Healing Salve and our Blissful Baby Balm.

 ::Sage::

 I looked around our garden this year and was amazed that we had planted so much sage. Jeff likes to dry it and use it to season beef and lamb.

Many baskets of these pretty flowers have been making their way into our home. I saved so many last year and have started to again this year (beyond what I’ll use to make our salves), so started offering the dried flowers for sale in the shop. I haven’t seen the flowers available for sale anywhere, only the green part (and the flowers are the most potent part of the plant.) I’m excited because we will be doing a swap in the fall with one of our friends who is an herbalist. We’ll give her dried St. John’s Wort flowers in exchange for hawthorn berries that she collects.

I’ve really come to love catnip over the years. We use it regularly in teas.

(Seeds available here.) 

 ::Dyer’s Chamomile::

I wrote about these flowers before in this post. We’ve just started gathering the flowers this year to dry. We still have some dried flowers from last year.

 ::Chives::

These chives were grown specifically for the seeds. The flowering heads started drying out, as you can see, and we’ll gather the tiny seeds out of them. (Seeds available here.)

The tiny apples on our two apple trees are so cute right now. 

The apples and blueberries are still green (though they’re getting a tinge of color.)

Jeff took these last three pictures of yesterday’s herb harvest all  together. The purple flowers in the center are sage flowers. The bees absolutely love them so Jeff only harvested a few. The harvest included the herbs I mentioned above (yarrow, St. John’s Wort, sage, catnip, chives) and also mugwort, spicy oregano, lemon verbena, mint, motherwort, wormwood, calendula, lemonbalm (and more I’m forgetting right now.) I’ve written about many of these herbs in last year’s garden tour of herbs. We planted so many and they are growing like crazy. The abundance can be overwhelming at times. As you can see, we have been saving more seeds and drying more herbs than what we can personally use. We’ve been offering more and more seeds in our shop and will continue to add more dried herbs to sell as well. We don’t want it sitting on a shelf in the pantry, going un-used. These herbs are too precious to waste.

The raindrops fell just after we brought in the last of the harvest yesterday. Today it’s been rainy and cloudy, with little bits of sunshine poking through. After breakfast, Bracken and I found a bunch of ripe strawberries in the garden. It made a mighty fine dessert. I’m glad we got some garden time yesterday. There’s always so much more to do out there than we can find the time for.

So, those are a few of the things growing in our garden right now.