I have shamefully neglected this blog--but fortunately not my garden! The last couple of months have been both full and stressful, with fun things, family emergencies, new housemates and schoolwork. I have therefore been indulging in "horticulture therapy," which is apparently a Thing, according to some guy in my Urban Planning course. In the oh-god-almost-2-months since I last posted all the green things have shot up. In the first image all that is in that squiggly bed is kale, shallots and strawberries. In the second image, which I took this morning, the kale is about a foot and a half tall, and has already been heavily picked. Also in this bed, from left to right, are lettuce and chives, purple bush beans, sunflowers, spinach, and strawberries along the back wall, then mustard greens and pinto beans, and basil, chard, cucumber and chamomile on the in the curved bit. Yes we still have a Steve Novick sign in the yard. 
Also noteworthy--I dragged the bricks over from the free pile Kailash Ecovillage. Last year they changed the sign from "The Cabana" and brought in a whole load of wood chips that sat there for months, which we thought was hilarious. Eventually they got a pretty good garden going, though. I have to approve even though I suspect it is at least 70% greenwashing.
The bush beans and garbanzos are starting to flower now. My summer beans, the Tuscan Wonders, are all sprouted next to many of my corn plants and sunflowers. They have proven their wonderfulness yet again by resprouting after slugs had eaten every bit of cotyledon and leaf off of two of them.
These are two of the sunflowers/beans growing in my front bed. Also in this picture is chard, volunteer potatoes that I thought I'd pulled out all of two years ago, an empty beer trap for slugs (which seem to have been pretty well foiled by the dry hot weather we've been having here) and a ton of detritus from the flowering and kind of sick rhododendron above this bed. Last year I had a bunch of crookneck squash in this bed, which did okay for the early part of the summer, and then got a really awful case of the white powder fungus, about a month earlier than anything else did. We're pretty sure the rhodie harbors it. This year I planted all my squash in Three Friends bed, with my corn and the surviving Tuscan Wonder Beans. The bean associated with this corn never made it out of the ground--its cotyledons got eaten before the first true leaves even came out.
The corn seed these came from were mixed red, yellow and blue, and I had thought that they all came from the same plant. I wonder, though, since the corn plants themselves are distinctly different colors. This red one is the most precocious, already having a tassel and baby corns sprouting on the sides. In the background you can see some of my squash. My housemate gave me some copper flashing she had around, and I made them into rings to repel slugs. They seem to have worked so far, assuming that the slugs have been out and about much since I put them in. I don't remember where I heard that copper is a good barrier, or if the explanation, that copper reacts with the mucus layer, causing an electric charge is accurate. Next year I'll try it earlier in the spring and see how it does then. I planted my artichokes three years ago. They were kind of scrawny and pathetic the first year, and pretty respectable last year. This year they are ginormous and gorgeous. They also produced about eight buds overnight. They almost didn't make it through the winter, but an aggressive mulch of rat bedding insulated them enough to make it. On the left edge of the image is the huge lavender bush, which attracts an unbelievable number of honey- and bumblebees.
And, lastly, our awesome new urban farming acquisition! We got three baby chickens last Monday. Left to right: Philomena Peepington, a Gold Sex-link, Sativa, an Ameraucana, and Medulla, an Australorp.
They are about five weeks old now. It will be a while before they lay, but in the mean time the are super cut and hilarious to watch. They have also gotten significantly bigger in the last week.
I also made them a rockin' house out of an old cupboard we found in the basement, some extra plywood, hinges I stole from a kitchen demo project a while ago, and a piece of very heavy black plastic that may very well have just blown into our yard. It worked out pretty well, but the chickies haven't quite figured out what to do with it, besides sit under it, and chase each other through the cinderblocks that are holding it up. Someday they will get big and then one of them will get stuck.
Okay, that was an epically long post. I'm going to do my level best to post in here more often, and with better pictures. Once again the day I pick to take all these photos is very overcast. I'll be taking a botanical illustration course this summer, so that should result in lots of pictures. Other things post soon: a catalog of my carnivorous plant collection, and one of my dozens of volunteer tomato plants, a rundown of the rad job I almost certainly didn't get but is still cool enough to post about, adventures in gardening for other people.
I'm really pleased with how my garden is shaping up. Only one total loss so far--my chinese cabbage bolted IMMEDIATELY after I put it in the ground. My cumin isn't doing so hot either, but I just put the two surviving sprouts in the ground, and hopefully they will get going. We're only really eating off the , cilantro, and last years onions so far, but the first few strawberries are ripe, the lettuce is about big enough for real salads, the peas are coming in, the basil is maybe a couple of weeks out from being edible-sized. It's exciting! and delicious!
