Strawberries, peas, baby cucumbers and 5 ladybugs!

Despite the fact that we are on track to be the coldest June in Vancouver's recorded history, we have managed to produce several juicy red strawberries and some English peas. We harvested the last of the peas today and planted a bunch more vines to harvest in July. This time I have made the stakes a lot taller, so hopefully they will grow a little less tangled up.

I also realized that we have not one but about 6 baby cucumbers and several cucumber blossoms, so the cucumber vines got tacked up off the ground as well.

The girls enjoyed feasting on the berries and peas today.

We also had some very welcome garden visitors: ladybugs. We counted a total of 5, but we hope that there are many more coming.

Finally, we finished making our summer flower baskets - better late than never, I suppose!

Sometimes you just gotta cheat!

The rain has been intense and some aspects of the garden are struggling to grow.  Our carrots in particular are not doing great, despite the fact that several of our neighbors have long fluffy carrot tops that are over 8 inches tall. Who would have thought that I would have ACTUAL  carrot envy, and not just diamond carat envy!! Our tomato plants are also blooming like crazy but not producing any fruit because of all the rain and clouds

So on Father's Day, we headed out to Mandeville gardens and got some more partially grown pea plants, carrot plants and one large green tomato plant with 2 small green tomatoes already on it. We also bought some new lettuce seedlings as ours are all rusting due to all the rain.

The other exciting seedling we found was for Japanese eggplants - yummy - so those came home with us too!

The girls love their garden so much that they wanted to take Chloe's last day of school photo in front of their veggie garden :-)

My girls ate peas!

Another brief day of sunshine and the strawberries were in full swing. Chloe and Vivi had a lot of fun hunting for some sweet juicy berries.

The cucumber plant put out its first blossom, followed by a tiny little cucumber.

The beets are now getting big and round enough to eat.

But the most exciting thing of all, is that the English peas were finally ready for picking. Not only that, but both girls actually ATE some and ENJOYED them!!

I can hardly wait until our pods fatten up a bit or we go to the farmer's market this year. It will be great now that the girls can help chose what they would like to eat!

Addendum: Just because they are cute little girls :-)

Again, not really part of the veggie blog, but since they are so cute..... 
After eating their juicy big strawberry, the girls ran around the yard enjoying the sunshine, which has been missing all week. A few pictures as a sweet reminder of a juicy sunny summer day.

A day of sunshine, and it's a whole new world!

A sunny Sunday afternoon and a hot Monday later and it's a whole new world! The cucumber plant has put out it's first blossom and the pea pods are starting to fatten up.

Most exciting of all, one big red juicy strawberry! Chloe and Vivi were very excited, and had fun sharing and eating the strawberry together.

Their only question was, where's the rest of them? A few of the others had a nice pink tinge to them, so one can only hope the sunny weather will hold out and we can get a few more sun-ripened beauties!

Rain rain go away .... Slugs!!

It has been a long time since I did a blog post because the only thing that has been going on in the garden is rain, rain and more rain!  The slugs have been in heaven, munching on our lettuce! Another trip to the Home Depot, this time for slug tape.

The beans, peppers and tomato plants have been blooming, but the bees have been busy hiding, tucked away from the rain. Very disappointing as there are no little tomatoes or bean pods to be seen.

The pea pods are doing their best to survive the elements while we do our sun dance, in hopes of brighter skies.

We also made a few additions to the garden:  a few more bush bean plants were added, this time in green. Also, I managed to find Japanese Eggplant plants! Yummy! I hope they grow some tender baby aubergines for us!