Quick Garden Update

I've been a little remiss in posting but here is a quick update of the doings in our garden:

Our "Prime Jan" (supposedly bears on first year canes but doesn't) blackberries are finally starting to come in. They are ferociously dangerous. You can't see it well in the picture, but we caged it in last year to keep it from sticking us to death. Stupidly we planted two of these monsters about a foot apart. Now it has formed a cone of thorns, so we will probably only brave the outer edges in our berry picking. In retrospect we should have ordered a thornless variety. Hopefully they will taste good and be worth the pain.

Our raspberries are also starting to come in. We won't have as many as last year but I am okay with that. I am actually still a little raspberried out.

Our chamomile is so big now I need to start deadheading it, so I can make some tea! I do wish the flowers were bigger (as they are supposed to be in German chamomile) but it is awfully pretty....and so satisfying to see such a full plant so early in the season. 

Onions are looking beautiful. In the foreground you can see some grocery store green onions that were part of a package we bought and didn't use in time so we planted them in the garden. We have done this before and they almost always take root.

I think the row on the right is the Butter Beauty and the row on the left is the Burpee Bibb. The stray one in the right upper corner is my one romaine that germinated. :sigh:

Rhubarb is getting big. I keep kicking myself that we didn't move it to the center of the square when we had the chance but at least we can grow some radishes next to it before the leaves are too much bigger and crowd everything out. This fall it WILL be moved! In the meantime we are going to try our hand at making jam.

And some beets! I planted some with homemade seed tape that I learned how to make from that clever gardener Garden Betty (seeds glued to toilet paper at evenly spaced intervals) and we planted some the regular way. The seed tape ones actually germinated better and are so beautifully even!

And finally....drum roll....we have a kohlrabi!!!! Or at least what we think is a kohlrabi. We have never grown this before and we have never seen a seedling or weed like this before so it must be it! Ideally I would like the rest of the seeds I planted to germinate but I will take just the one if that is all I get.

 Oh, and the asparagus we thought we killed when we built our new bed, guess not. Nature finds a way. The one stalk growing between the bed and the walkway is already trying to put out a fern (that spindly thing off to the far left of the picture). The annoying thing is that while we have asparagus, we never have much asparagus. We had hundreds of asparagus seed pods on our fern two years ago and it takes two years to come up so where is it all?