Waiting...

Things are still moving slow in the garden.  Having not visited during the past week, I was expecting to see more progress.  There is some progress, but a lot of very slow movement.  And you will probably notice that our soil seems to be a bit clayey.  We do need to add more compost...

The lettuce is mostly coming along nicely.

  

 The Chard still looks like it is barely holding on.  

There is absolutely no signs of carrots germinating and the radishes we planted amongst the carrots are barely and spottily starting to grow.

 And the onions are growing, but again without much vigor.

On the other hand, the tomatoes are looking just fine.  

 Peppers, parsley and basil look good, too. 

 Near as we can tell, the squashes appear to be growing and will soon have to be released from their covers to fend off the pests as best they can.  The nasturtiums we planted around the squash beds are not faring well and we lost at least a couple of them.

 The biggest surprise is the garlic.  The scapes are coming along and we will likely be harvesting some shortly.  I guess we were clued in to the emergence of the scapes when we were seeing them everywhere at the Farmer's Market in the park Saturday morning.

Speaking of Saturday morning...we got out early and headed down to Maxwell's in Cape Elizabeth to pick our first Strawberries of the season.  It was their first day of picking and we arrived right about the 7am opening time and there were already dozens of cars parked and dozens of people picking!  We picked 4 pounds of berries in less than 10 minutes, and not moving beyond a 10 foot stretch of strawberry row.  And they are very good berries, too.  Looking forward to hopefully a 3 week picking season instead of the 10 days they were open last year.  I love picking in Cape Elizabeth with the sounds of the fog horns, the smell of the ocean and the sounds of the ocean, too, if the wind is blowing in the right direction.  And I am convinced that salt air helps make the berries especially good, too.

Beyond our garden, here are a few pictures of some other flowers in other plots.  And the Peonies are blooming all over the Maine Audubon  property right now, both in the formal garden plot and wild in the woods and meadows.  Lots of beauties.

And one last non-garden picture of a Kousa Dogwood (Cornus kousa) tree growing in our neighborhood.  I have never seen so many blossoms on one of these as this one.  They are normally full of blossoms, but this one is exceptional.  This is one of my favorite landscape trees.  It flowers abundantly later in the season than flowering dogwoods, it holds it's blossoms much longer, and it has beautiful raspberry sized fruits later in the year.  (The fruit is a globose pink to red compound berry 2–3 cm in diameter, though these berries tend to grow larger towards the end of the season and some berry clusters that do not fall from the tree surpass 4 cm. It is edible, a sweet and delicious addition to the tree's ornamental value. The fruit is sometimes used for making wine. - from Wikipedia)