In the Garden

This year I started gardening early. Early for central BC is planting outdoors before the May long weekend.  Some plants I started indoors in April, others I planted directly outdoors in early May.  This is a lucky spring for gardeners as our last frost was in mid-May.  Highly unusual but what luck for an overeager gardener!

Here's what's growing in the garden:

Halona Cantaloupe, in a large black pot on the south-facing deck:

May 24

June 10

The Hungarian Sweet Pepper had beautiful little flowers:

And now we have a beautiful little pepper!

The Table Queen acorn squash dominates the plastic-covered raised bed.

And here are my two Patio Snacker cucumber plants: One from the nursery and one grown from seed.

Grow, little one!  You have to catch up to the privileged, grown-in-a-greenhouse cucumber!

I used pieces of fencing as trellises.  Not very fancy, but definitely cheap as it was left over from another project.

We've been eating butter lettuce and mesclun non-stop for the past three weeks, usually with a steak or porkchop cooked on the grill.  Summer eating is the best.

The mesclun is being ravaged by insects but the butter lettuce is untouched.  Thanks, mesclun, for taking one for the team!

Now that everything is planted what do I do with all my spare time?  I spend it watering and willing things to grow faster. 

Grow!

Which Came First? The Chicken or the Egg

In our case, it was definitely the chicken.  Our chickens were born around May 4.  We collected them to our home shortly after.  And then we waited.  And waited.  And so on.  We read up online and in books to find out how long we should be waiting.  Then waited some more. 

I checked the nest boxes for weeks, just in case.  Finally, that magical day arrived.  The Egg!

The Egg was perfect, tiny and green.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  Because it was green we knew one of the four Ameraucana/Easter Eggers/Olive Eggers had laid it.  Actually, we knew the Olive Egger had laid it, we just didn’t know which chicken was the Olive Egger. 

It was one of these girls; which one could it be?

 We had so much time to wait for The Egg that I had time to build an egg hod.  I found the plans at  Fresh Eggs Daily, a great online resource for chicken keeping.  Here’s the egg in the hod:

Due to the disparity in size between product and product receptacle, we have since decided to use the hod to collect vegetables.

And here’s a dog’s nose for size comparison:

Here’s how the egg looked cracked in the pan:

And here’s how it tasted:

Yum!