May 2009: Fruits, mostly on the vine.

Here is a row of peas . . .I harvested a couple good batches, but if you don't eat them whole (ie. in the pods), it takes a lot to get many peas (see meager bowl below).

I found a worm in one or two of them:

And I saved some of the peas to replant later:

One of the bolder moves I made this year was to plant soybeans so we could have homegrown edamame. That would've made us really popular amongst our cosmopolitan friends! Well, this was the sum total of this years soybean crop:

Between it and the corn, it really surprises me that these are such huge, productive agricultural commodities that are cheap to grow and thus make it into so many of our foods. If it were up to my agricultural know-how, I think our global food system would be hinged much more heavily on turnips and cherry tomatoes, b/c those seem to be the only things I can grow with any ease or consistency.

Green beans bracketed by asparagus and corn:

The green beans closer up:

These "green" beans arer actually purple. They're a deep, amazing color -- one of the prettiest things I think I've grown so far:

In this bed I had a few peppers, a few more tomatoes, a honeydew and some other things (like the solo soybean plant that came up):

Here is the bed full of tomatoes, squash, watermelon, and cucumber as they were just getting started:

Here they are again a few weeks later:

A couple squash plants and their blossoms close-up:

Here's the first yellow squash alongside the shallots I had just pulled:

Here are some tomatoes that were planted right next to the squash plants:

And then a few cucumber plants . . .

Early on, the watermelon started pushing boundaries and crossing borders. By the end of the summer, it had enveloped half of a neighboring bed:

Finally, the strawberries, which look so lovely and green until they died.