Thyme For Cooking, the Blog: Come into my garden.....

I've been tagged by Cyberdelia of Avidly Dreaming for the "seven random garden facts" meme.

Now I am wondering: is it because I have a garden? Or because I have a tendency to wander randomly?

Regardless, I take these things very seriously. Interspersed with the seven random facts will be four actual photos of my current 'potager' (vegetable garden).

1. In Andorra I had an herb garden only slightly bigger than a postage stamp, right next to our door. It had 1 sage plant, 1 rosemary plant, 2 thyme plants, 1 marjoram plant and 1 clump of chives. I had basil and parsley in pots. When it rained in Andorra it came down by the bucket full. The water would come rushing down the mountain past our house (3000 feet) to the village below. After one particularly hard rain, my little herb garden was buried under a foot of rocks. The water coming off the wall by our house had changed direction ever so slightly.

2. I love green beans. Always have. I am terrified of spiders. Always have been. (It's an irrational fear, but what can I say...it's irrational!). When I was about 12, our neighbor had to be gone for a week. As a treat for me (so the story goes) she told me that I could have all of her beans provided I picked them. I happily agreed. The first day I went to pick beans there was a spider (naturally) on one of the leaves. I very gingerly picked only the beans I could see without moving or touching the leaves. By the time she came back the plants were full of huge, tough, inedible beans and had quit producing. She was not pleased! But then, neither was I... I'd hardly had any beans!

3. It's about 150 yards from my kitchen to my vegetable garden. To run down and grab a zucchini for dinner takes about 6 minutes. The dogs love it!

4. I bring seeds back from the U.S. for our 'American' vegetables: sweet corn (pig food), acorn squash (pig food), green beans, (bigger then the tiny 'haricot vert'). I keep waiting for the GM (genetic modification) police to come and haul me away!

5. I always plant too much. I just can't seem to help myself. There are so many seeds in those little packages and my German Catholic upbringing just won't let me throw them out. (That's right, blame it on the nuns!) Instead, I carefully plant, water, weed, hoe.... and end up throwing rows of lettuce and radishes in the compost pile. For the other stuff ...

6. I have a 'Vegetable Freezer'. It's sole use is for the harvest from my vegetable garden. It's kind of an interim stop before the compost pile. It goes like this:
Plant all of the seeds.
Eat as much as we can; what we can't goes directly to the compost pile if it can't be frozen.
If it can be frozen it goes in the freezer until the freezer's full; what's left goes in the compost pile.
Eat what's in the freezer until the next planting season, or until we're so sick of it we can't bare the thought; what's left goes in the compost pile.
The compost pile is clearly the winner in all this. Mon mari claims I could eliminate a lot of steps if I just wouldn't plant all the seeds....right! Then we'd have to buy fertilizer!

7. I love dill pickles. They don't exist here, anywhere. There are the little French cornichon, which are very good, but they're not dill pickles. So I have to grow my own little pickling cukes and dill (I have to bring the seeds from the U.S.) and make my own pickles.

The photos, from the top:
1. The entire garden. I plant in combination to save space (and hoeing). The pumpkin is in between the corn rows, the melons are in the beans, the dill is in the pickle patch, etc. The empty dirt is where my tomatoes were before they bit the dust...sigh!
2. My monster zucchini! We had such a cool start to summer the foliage on everything went crazy... I'm just now starting to get some vegetables.
3. The cucumber, pickle and dill patch.
4. The dogs in their spot at the end of the lane going to the house. On their left are blackberry brambles; on the right apple, pear, fig, plum, walnut and hazelnut trees, and table grapes. The cherry, peach and more plum trees are in a different pasture.