It’s height of the gardening season here in the Pacific Northwest. Now, I am no master gardner. Not by a long shot. But my best friend Dayna happens to be a botanist and a very talented gardner. Last year, for instance, she grew about a million sun gold tomatoes that had so much flavor, it tasted like the sun was turned into candy and then exploded in your mouth. Unfortunately Dayna tends to be a busy person and she gets kind of stressed out by the work of gardening. So this year, I told her that in exchange for gardening lessons and some of the crops, I’d be her garden helper.

While Dayna is off on vacation in Maui for 2.5 weeks, I am in charge of keeping the garden going. Along with this week’s ongoing harvest of snow and snap peas, delicious strawberries and raspberries and some kale, today’s harvest was of massive amounts of arugula and bok choi. So much that I don’t really know what I’ll do with it all.

The best part of today’s work though turned out to be transplanting the carrots which needed to be thinned out to 3″-5″ apart. Dayna’s instructions were to very carefully dig the dirt away from the carrot tops and gently pull them up to re-plant them. What was so neat about this is that one doesn’t generally get to see root crops like onion, garlic, potato and carrot growing cause they’re buried in the ground. When I gently pulled up the carrots, I was amazed to see that even at this very young age (maybe 5 weeks since they were planted, they already look like carrots. Just really teeny, tiny ones.

just for a sense of perspective.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Check this out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.