The Fruits of Our Labors

You'll have to excuse me if I get a bit excited about having edible items in the garden.  This is the first time we've ever had a veggie garden, now in it's second year, and although it's only small and very simple, we're already reaping some benefits.

Basically, we have peas, tomatoes, chives, parsley and lemon thyme, and some marigolds to bring in the pollinators. (I said it was small). 

Oh, and there are some strawberry plants in there, but the parsley has crowded them out, plus I now understand they do better when they are in a strawberry planter instead of in a flat garden. The ants and/or birds seem to get to any strawberries before we get a chance to taste them. 

  
The peas are doing great. They seem a little reluctant to climb the trellis we installed for them, preferring instead to tangle with each other and the cane teepees, but that's okay.  They're covered in flowers and we even have some pods forming :-)

We've enjoyed adding some fresh parsley and fresh garlic chives to our cooking - a first for us!

Back at the beginning of March, my husband planted a Seto Satsuma Mandarin to replace the one he hand planted last year and that had drowned due to being in a bad location.  We also planted a Naval Orange.   

Throughout March we were blessed with the exotic sweet scent of their blooms and now there appear to be lots of tiny fruiting forming.  Since the trees are only 4ft high, we're not going to expect too much from them, but if at least a few of the fruits grow to a decent size and ripen, we'll consider it a success.

At one end of the island bed, we planted a Sam Houston Peach tree last year (we thought it an appropriate choice, given our location). 

It took a while to get going and we thought perhaps we had lost it over the winter.  However, it leafed out quite vigorously this spring and put out two, count 'em, two, blooms.  I assume that the fuzzy blob in the middle of this photo is a baby peach.  This is the bigger of the two,  perhaps a centimeter long.  It will be interesting to see how it does :-)
 

What I'm really looking forward to are some Roma tomatoes!  But alas. although the plant seems healthy and is growing, it's not blooming yet.  I'll just have to be patient, a virtue of which I am lacking sometimes!

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.