First garden harvest, and other garden news

Yippee!!  The first-fruits of our labors are in.  If nothing else produces well but the peas, I will still call this a successful year...but already we've enjoyed several tiny, delicious little strawberries, and I'm watching at least a couple dozen berries grow and ripen on the raspberry and blackberry bushes. And the beans have finally started growing well and are producing flowers now.  Maybe there's hope yet for the rest of the garden...

A couple days ago, I picked our first harvest of peas.  There will be at least one more good harvest before they're done, so it was pretty exciting to see how many I got on the first sweep.

Today the Munch and I sat down to shell all these peas.  I showed her how, and she got it more or less figured out pretty quickly.  She was very focused, and we're all looking forward to eating our fresh peas in a curried fettuccine tonight.

The garden has had some excitement lately...We had several days of strong rains that came off and on, gradually inundating soils and filling up gravel pits.  A week ago Monday, I got home from work to find 3 inches of standing water at my garage step.  I'm glad I was wearing sandals, because there was no other way to get through all that water but to grin and bear it.  I went into the house and brought out the Munch's rain boots so at least SHE didn't have to wade through muddy water.

By Tuesday evening it had mostly receded into the gravel--a much better result than we would have had without that pit, so it still did its job...but clearly every gravel pit has limits, and we found ours.

You may have noticed that big 'bag' over a portion of the box in the above picture.  That was the result of another problem I started having...Sparrows.  If I thought squirrels might be a problem, I thought wrong.  The birds were swarming the plants, eating the tops and buds, and I suspect picking on the other, smaller plants as well, because nothing else was growing well.  So the plastic wrap was my very temporary measure to at least keep them off until I could get something more permanent.  And I had to do it twice...The first time wasn't tight enough, and the first sparrow to find the barrier started pulling it apart!

So a day or two later, I replaced the plastic wrap with bird netting, fastened to 10 foot long PVC pipes.  It actually didn't even take that much work--maybe 20 or 30 minutes per box, and the Munch was very eager to help hold things for me--and I've noticed marked improvement in the cucumbers and beans since I put these up.  This is what it looks like currently:

  

I still have the back box to do, and I need to finish the wire cage I'm building around the berry bushes, but I'm not seeing the birds like I used to.  At least for now, my garden is safe...until the next hazard, right?  I will enjoy it while I can!  On to eat those peas!  :D