Dark things

Just wanted to share a few pictures from the garden this morning... The combination of chocolate vine and gavota tulips is one of my favorites. So many of my favorite things are blooming and happening right now. All it takes is three drops of rain to pop out our first edible mushrooms of the season (dryad's saddle). There are some coming on top of the hill that we'll pick later today. For now, I must go hunt warblers. I mean "hunt" in the passive, watch-them-fly-over sense, of course. B-bye.

Cutting mix from the cold frames

April has yielded the first garden harvests of 2010 (unless you count overwintered leeks, which we've been pitchforking out of the ground since February). We seeded two cold frames full of mixed cutting lettuces, kale, arugula and spinach in mid-March, and salad is on the table now. Baby leaves sprinkled with a vinaigrette of last season's shallots, or new chives and tarragon... Yum!

This is the first spring that our espaliered apple trees have really started to develop some nice form and a bit of character. They are messy and pretty with blossoms, as their spurs aren't pruned until later in the summer. We'll be trying a spraying of Surround, an organic kaolin clay product, to prevent plum curculios from riddling and ruining our (tiny) apple crop.

It's hard to choose the Fondest Object of My Heart right now, but the Gavota tulips are competing strongly... For being such hot little numbers, these are actually very old! Some of them 10 years at least, having moved with me from my last home to Fig St.