Garden Report: So far, so good

 My vegetable garden is off to a great start this summer.

I've picked a lot of kale. I love it in green salads. (The other night I used it in a spaghetti dish: Sauté some garlic and onions in olive oil, boil some chopped-up kale for a few minutes, remove kale from water and add it to the olive oil/onions/garlic, then add lemon juice; boil spaghetti in the kale water. Combine the sautéed garlic/onion/kale mixture and the drained spaghetti, sprinkle spaghetti with grated Parmesan cheese. Voila! A tasty dish.

I've already picked one green pepper, although it is quite early to harvest peppers in these parts. The past two years I've used the Epsom salt trick to get a better green pepper yield: Mix one tablespoon of Epsom salt in 32 oz. water. Spray pepper plants soon after setting seedlings in the ground, then spray again two weeks later.  This causes the plants to yield a lot more peppers. I think, if I remember correctly, it's the magnesium in the Epsom salt that is doing the trick. I chop and freeze most of our green peppers and use them throughout the winter.

I have two beds of garlic. This is my first year trying garlic, so I put one bed in my regular garden area and another in my flower garden. I'm not sure which area will yield the better crop, but time will tell.

The tomato plants, all 18 of them, are developing well. Ditto for the cucumbers and zucchini. I'm especially hopeful to have a good tomato crop this year, because last year's was a bust. I can tomatoes to use in various dishes all winter long. I guess I could purchase canned tomatoes just as easily, or even more easily, but home canned tomatoes have much, much better flavor than the store-bought ones. My friend Lynn has made this claim for years, and I thought she was imagining the difference. Then I purchased some canned tomatoes from the store this past winter. Yuck! There's no comparison.

And finally, to add a little anxiety to my gardening adventures, I spotted this critter looking longingly at  my garden early this morning. There's a second deer hiding in the bushes behind this one. I didn't realize that until I shooed the first one back into the woods. Here's hoping they'll stay out of my garden this summer.