Yeah, it’s raining rain. Not men, like in that really stupid song. The days are getting shorter, someone pointed out to me today. OK. I’ve set a goal to cut down on pointless complaining. But this rain … it’s been raining for what seems like a month. This week has been like 80% gray so far. Bleh.

Since the last photo-filled post the garden has literally exploded. Well not literally. But stuff has grown so much in the last 2 weeks it’s amazing. (if the sun ever comes out more pictures will be taken) Except for the peppers. They’re quite puny still. Very healthy looking at the growing tips but they need the hot hot heat that we ought to have had by now. The only heat has been what I generate while spinning to the Morning Express lady on Headline News Network. Robin Meade. Sigh.

Look at her expression. She and weatherman Bob Van Dillen were running down the current doofus.

Robin has a different hairdo every day. She comes on at 6:00 which is when I’m usually in my cool-down phase. Lately she’s been taking Fridays off or jumping out of airplanes with George Bush Senior. It’s upsetting when she’s not on. The local news, which starts at 5:00 and give weather forecasts every quarter hour, plays 3 commercials every 5 minutes. And the weather forecasts lately have been … OK … enough complaining about the weather already. Something happier …

My awesome daughter got me this for father’s day.

She got me this cool t-shirt too.

She also gave me some new cycling shorts, which I really needed. The kind with a nice chamois pad liner inside. They’re great, I’ve used them a few times now. Some really nice gifts. Good Father’s day this year. Blogfriend Curious C made a garlic artichoke pie in honor of the holiday and my garlic obsession. We made a garlic scape pesto shrimp pizza. Wish we could grow shrimp in the garden too. With all this frackin rain …

Garlic scape pesto under fresh mozarella and split shrimp.

We’ve got a blooming cactus going on indoors. Regina Spektor’s new album, Far, is still soaking in to my cerebellum, even after 15 or more listenings. Her music and lyrics are so, um, unique. Björk-like. Love her! So it’s like it says on the t-shirt. Life is Good.

This cactus flower doesn’t know that it’s raining outside, or does it?

Weather for today? Forecast says rain, heavy at times, with thunder storms possible in the afternoon.

So summer began early this morning, with the solstice at 5:45 UTC (Coördinated Universal Time), while I was making Zs. Speaking of making Zs, here begins that boring garden catalog post that I warned about in the last post.  For the purposes of my own garden record keeping, this is a photo-listing of what’s doing what in our gardens. If you find this sort of thing boring, but like British comedy, then please click this link and watch Green Wing on Hulu.com. It’s an hour-long show set in a hospital, like Scrubs, but a little zanier, if that’s possible. It appeared for only 2 seasons in the UK, and a few years after Scrubs (2004), so maybe it’s an example of US TV influence on BBC? Maybe? I know it seems unlikely.

Anyway, before the tedious garden photos, here’s a nice image my wife captured as a deer bolted through the yard. The deer have not done much damage this year. Perhaps they felt guilty about eating all the tulips last year.

Yeah, it’s all blurry and stuff, but something about this image appealed to my eye.

All righty then. First the garden behind the house. There are 17 beds. Listing from east to west, here is what is planted in each one, with photos.

I climbed a ladder to get these views.

• Bed 1- Fall 2008 -planted garlic with volunteer mustard, dill, poppies at edge
• Bed 2- Onions started from seed
• Bed 3- Onions started from seed
• Bed 4- Sugarsnap peas, planted early April, volunteer mustard, dill, poppies at edges

Camera pans to the west … north is bottom, south is top of frame

• Bed 5- Spring planted garlic, lettuces at south end
• Bed 6- Peppers, mostly hot peppers, and a sweet red variety called Chinese Red Giant
• Bed 7-  more peppers, 4 tomato plants, zucchini and yellow summer squash, rockpile, cucumber tower

• Bed 8- bronze fennel, carrots, gladiolus
• Bed 9- snap beans, basil
• Bed 10- bronze fennel, snap beans

• Bed 11- 2nd year parsnips going to seed, unplanted spot, 2nd-year leeks going to seed, unplanted spot
• Bed 12- green and purple cabbages, broccoli
• Bed 13- brussels sprouts, more cabbages

Bed 15, purple and white cauliflowers, looking northward.

• Bed 14- asparagus overrun by volunteer mustard that I perhaps mistakenly allowed to grow. The asparagus seem to have given up. I thought they would poke through anyway.
• Bed 15- cauliflowers and somehow a couple of purple cabbages got planted there. The seedlings look very similar.
• Bed 16- purple cabbages, celery, and more sugarsnap peas

4 tiny celery plants are behind the pinwheel.

Bed 17 is planted with jerusalem artichokes, perennials, which are about 5 feet high now. They should grow another foot or two and start flowering. The dense foliage of this bed shows how aptly named is this variety of helianthus tuberosus: Stampede. I wish I could hover about 50 feet over the garden to get a bird’s eye view of the whole plot, but instead I leaned an extension ladder up against a couple of the large pines a bit north of the beds. It was a little scary.

Beds 15, 16, and 17, looking southward.

The asparagus are probably really mad at me for letting this mustard go. I hope they survive.

The brussels sprouts again.

Purple cabbages.

The leeks, beginning to flower.

The plot behind the barn. Tomatoes, sweet corn, winter squash, and pumpkins.

OK then. The plot behind the barn got short attention here, and it’s bigger than the backyard beds, but oh well. There will be more coverage later. The corn plants are due to be “knee-high by 4th of July” and they’re well on the way. What we need is a little warmer weather. It’s been cool and damp so far, but now that summer is officially here …

The garlic scapes from bed 1.

Whipped up a batch of pesto from about half of the garlic scapes. There were quite a few recipes to be found on the internet, but I ended up improvising. Scapes, olive oil, parmesan cheese, walnuts, juice of 2 limes, salt pepper and a little parsley and fennel. It’s sitting in the fridge maturing.

Happy Summer to everyone in the northern hemisphere.

I had a birthday a couple weeks back. Big deal … 53. It’s a prime number. Lots of nice people wished me happy birthday on Facebook. I took the day off work and practiced bicyclism. I endeavored to ride my age in miles. It took a while at the speed I went. I made a day of it, stopped for lunch at Subway (hey Jerod!) and made it to 54, which is the longest ride of this season I guess. If I keep up this birthday custom I’ll need to switch to kilometers at some point.

You know something? I think Facebook is eroding the blogosphere. And Twitter. It’s like our attention span is on the verge of collapsing into a black hole. Time to invest in the apocalypse insurance my friends …

This is a perennial poppy in the herb garden, which is otherwise overrun with grasses.

I forget what these are called, but I love them.

There’s been a lot of digging in the garden behind the barn. It finally came to an end Sunday. It’s pretty soft soil, with a decade plus of horse manure and bedding worked into it. The expected number of rocks floated up last winter, and got stacked cairnlike.

Before the final 6 hours of forking.

After. There are 7 mounds on the right for winter squashes. 4 beds left for whatever.

I may be crazy to have dug all that out by hand, but so what if I am? After completing this task I went for a bike ride around my town and Newbury, the adjacent town. Newbury has an electrolysis business. Riding past I caught the scent of Sunday afternoon barbecue. Mmmm. If I stopped and checked it out they would say “Um, we’re closed” and I would say, “But it’s an emergency”. I’d leave before the police were called.

Be warned that there is coming an utterly boring catalog post, consisting of photos of what’s growing in each bed of the garden. This blog functions as a garden journal, as well as documentation of my ignorant, pointless, meandering, obsessive thought patterns. For now, as promised in the previous post, the garlic has begun to form scapes.

A few scapes a day are plucked to divert energy to the bulb.

Last year I read that it’s better to pluck off the garlic scapes sooner, before they make their graceful curlicues. So even though my friend and I chatted about how much we love the swirly stalks of garlic bulbilation, I’m picking them at just a few inches in length. Right now bed #1 yields about a half-dozen scapes a day. Should have enough for the pesto soon. The spring-planted garlic is not scaping yet, if that’s a word. Guess you’ll see in the big boring catalog post that I swear I’m gonna get right to any day now. After I’m all done procrastinating. Come to think of it, I’m falling behind in my procrastinating too. Today I discovered not one, but two issues of WIRED at home still in the plastic. Why do they put that plastic on the WIRED magazine anyway?