I didn’t give an update on the garden last month, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going. Thank goodness, right?

This shot was before Rudi and I did some work today. Rudi pulled out a lot of weeds and planted some new seedlings. We now have half a dozen basil plants, a half dozen tomatoes, several peppers, a zucchini, and a cucumber in addition to the plethora of herbs and spring veggies. I harvested the rest of the arugula today, unearthing a bed of lettuce beneath it and will probably pull the spinach later this week. I will need to thin the sorrel again.

The pea blossoms of early May have mostly turned into pods. They were super happy when Rudi and I finally tracked down some taller stakes, since the tallest shoots extend past the six-foot mark.

I have at least three kinds of peas — shelling peas, purple sugar snap peas, and green sugar snap peas. I also have fava beans, but they are really short this year, so I’m not sure they’ll survive the resident fauna.

I don’t have any strawberry photos, but rest assured that we’ve been picking a couple each time we visit the garden.

Plants that yield later in the season are starting to make themselves known:

We are not without our challenges. We have had a lot of rain this spring. I thought I’d lost both the dahlia and the gerber daisy I planted, but the dahlia shows signs of being hardier than the vast amount of water soaking it.

Also a side effect of the rain, are these guys:

Pardon the blurry shot. This was the first day we put out beer last month. There are fewer slugs in the garden now, but those that remain — clearly the teetotalers — are voracious. Rudi has to fight them for his strawberries.

Finally, the mammalian residents of the garden include Peter (or perhaps Petra?) and a smaller bunny, as well as the rats that hang out in the compost. I squealed in my mother’s ear over the phone one evening, when a rat took a shortcut home to the forest through my plot and came inches from running over my foot. I’m not really sure which of us was most startled.