Puttering

I have to resist the urge to be always puttering in the garden.  There’s so much space left to dig up and plant, so many suckers to pinch and worms to squish!  The pictures in the post below are of our first two veggie beds in the new house.  They’re both packed full – brussels sprouts, peppers, tomatoes, squash and melons in the first bed, and tomatillos, beans, cucumbers and potatoes in the second.  Everything’s growing bigger and faster now that we’re farther from the beach, but we’re also getting new pests – I just about died when a huge grasshopper jumped out at me from the brussels (this is its baby brother I caught a pic of later on).  I’m working on training Norman to hunt them down for me.

Yikes.  Never thought I’d miss hornworms, but here we are.  Something about the hopping really freaks me out.  Sadly, Norm doesn’t seem to care at all, so it looks like I’ll be resorting to shrieking and running away when I see them.

Much of the garden is still in its incubation stages, but the brussels sprouts are finally at their harvest size.  I just love the way these look on the stalk, so it was tough to pop them off one by one.  Knowing how delicious they’d be, I made it happen.

We had a delicious summer meal of veggies and grilled chicken, topped off by these beauties, roasted until they were perfectly caramelized and sweet.  From the looks of it, we’ve got enough for about 10 more meals like this – should be a delicious summer!