I've had a garden plot for a month now. I've learned a lot about the garden from visiting it regularly. I'll walk down there with no idea what I want to do today, and after a few minutes of being there something occurs to me. Gradually I'm developing a feeling that I like the place a lot.

  

This is two views of the grape vines. My big accomplishment so far was getting them ready for the new season. That involved finding a source for T stakes and wire and pruning and tying the vines so they should do well. I pruned the vines before I really knew how I was going to stake them, so they aren't quite right near the corner of the plot. Next year I'll do that better, assuming I like them enough to keep them going after the harvest.

One time I found a ziplock bag with some pages of instruction on the care of grape vines by them "from Marcie" by the roots of the grape vine. I think that Marcie is that woman that wants to get as much food production out of the garden as possible. I'm grateful for the advice, but I hope she doesn't turn into a micro-manager. She likes the fact that I'm good at stamping down the dumpster.

One time I found this huge root mass under the grape canes and so forth in the dumpster. I had to do some asking around to find out that it was Bolivian Sunchokes. I took home an armload of tubers and put the rest in the CSA donation box. I've been putting the ones I brought home in salads, where they are delicious. There was a note on the CSA donation box to the effect "get these dahlia's out of here." I replied with a note that they were suchokes and delicious in soups and salads. After that the donation box disappeared. I hope I didn't mess up the system by rescuing that food from the landfill. I also planted a few of the tubers on my plot. I'm curious what the plant looks like above those tuber complexes!

The broccoli that I planted is doing okay, but nothing dramatic has come of it yet.

     

The lettuce is doing fine. Actually the one that's getting tall was sweet when it was younger, but now the flavor is getting rather sharp, kind of like Swiss chard. I steal a few leaves from those plants every time I visit. For some reason I like plucking and eating in the same time frame. Delicious!

The cat lady tells me that those blueish shoots are flowers, maybe Iris or something like that. I'm hoping to enjoy the flowers.

The snow peas I planted are my first failure.  Seems like the birds wanted to eat them. People tell me that if you want to succeed with that kind of plant you need to put a tent over it or an old plastic bucket to keep them away. Next time I'll do it that way.

     

The rose bushes are all starting to wake up after their winter nap. You can barely see the little leaflets, but they are showing.

  

The plot came with a fava bean crop that had been ignored by the previous owner. I threw out most of the plants before I knew what they were, but I left a patch for later. Then one day I got around to that batch, and there were lots of beans on the vines. It was kind of fun to separate the beans from the stalks and pods. I ended up with a jar of the things. I also ended up with a bunch of beans on the ground. People were saying good things about growing fava beans as "green manure". What you do is grow them until just before the beans start to grow, and the chop the plants down and mix them into the soil. That adds a lot of nitrogen, which everything you plant after that will love. So I've been watering the beans and moving them around to make a nice bean patch. It's no work at all to make them grow.