(This is a continuing series of weekly letters exchanged between Dee, who gardens in Oklahoma, and Mary Ann, who gardens in Idaho, comparing how similar and different our gardens are, especially the vegetable gardens.)

Dear Dee and Mary Ann and Gardening Friends Everywhere,

Greetings from the garden on this last day of May, Memorial Day 2010! I’ve attached a picture so you can see what I harvested yesterday morning.

That’s about 10 lbs. of strawberries, in case you are wondering, the second “good picking” from my little 4’ x 8’ patch of strawberries. I weighed them just to be able to tell you that. They are very sweet, too, so I usually eat them plain, no sugar needed. I shared some with some friends yesterday and will eat my way through the rest of them.

I thought about making strawberry freezer jam, but I know me, and I’d probably never get around to it, so I’ll just enjoy them while I have them. I’ve forgotten what the variety is – somewhere around here is a plant tag for them – but they are supposed to be ever bearing. So far, after five years, they seem more like June bearing because once these are gone in the next few weeks, that’s all I’ll get for the season.

I also picked what is probably the last of the lettuce. It bolted with the spinach, which is fine because right in the middle of that bed where the lettuce is, I planted cucumbers, so the lettuce was going to have to be pulled out eventually, anyway.

The rest of the harvest included lots of snow peas, some onions and a few radishes. This has been a most disappointing year for radishes! Many of them just did not form good radishes, and I even waited to plant them when the moon was waning, which is when you are supposed to plant root crops. Because I waited for the moon phase to change, I did plant them a few weeks later than I normally do, but I wouldn’t think that would make much of a difference. I’m going to sow more radish seeds today, mostly around the squash because I read once that radishes help deter squash bugs, and I’ll see if some of those do better.

The rest of the garden is coming along nicely. Most of the seeds I sowed last week have germinated. No doubt the warm days we had last week, with high temperatures in the high 80’s, helped move things along. Now I need to spend some quality time weeding because the weeds are growing just as quickly as everything else in the garden.

I hope you both are enjoying nice weather in your gardens… I hear the birds calling me out to the garden early today on this holiday, so I’ll close as always…

Hortifully yours,

Carol

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Don’t forget to go back to Friday’s post about the hoe●dag®, to leave a comment about your missing garden tools and enter to win your very own hoe●dag®. Deadline is Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 9:00 pm EST. My goodness, there are some funny stories of missing tools and some sad ones, too. Where are all those garden tools going, and are garden fairies involved in their disappearance? Find out on Tuesday.