How Does Your Garden Grow?

The library doesn't open until 2 pm on Fridays so I have the mornings off.  Usually I spend the morning cleaning, it kind of becomes my day to catch up on housekeeping that got put off during the week.  But today, the weather was so beautiful, I was drawn outside.  I decided to plant my peas and build a trellis for them to grow upon.  I haven't ever grown peas before, which I think is kind of surprising because they are my favorite vegetable.  Just ask Joey, I try to work them into all sorts of dinners from macaroni and cheese to tuna noodle casserole and spaghetti.  In my opinion, they taste good with everything!  (And they're cheap to buy frozen!)  So anyway, I just hope it is not too late to grow peas because all of the gardening books that I have consulted have said that peas are a cold-weather vegetable and that you should plant them as soon as you can work the soil because they can withstand frost and hate hot weather.  So we'll see how my pea experiment goes.  I fashioned a kind of trellis for the peas to vine on out of some chicken wire I found in the garage and some electric fence stakes that I bought at Farm King for $1 apiece.  It's not too pretty, but hopefully it will get the job done.  I planted my snap peas by the trellis and then I built two teepee-like trellises for my shell peas.  I had some thin bamboo stakes in the garage from last year that I bought to stake my tomatoes and didn't end up using because they were waaaay too flimsy to hold a heavy tomato plant.  I just stuck 6 stakes in the ground in a circle and then tied them at the top with yarn (I couldn't find any twine or string.)  Then I planted the seeds around the outsides of the teepees.  I also had time to plant some zucchini seeds and rake the rest of the garden with my new rake!  Yes friends, I get excited about garden tools now.  Since Joey has abandoned me to go turkey hunting again this weekend (stupid turkeys)  I have plans to plant the rest of my garden.  I don't know if my tomatoes are ready to go outside yet, and I know my peppers and eggplants aren't ready, so maybe everything except those three.  Next up: three different kinds of cucumbers and purple green beans.

Oh, and if you'd like to follow along with the Astoria Library book club we are reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows for our June meeting.