First GRUBS salad

Here is Fiona enjoying her first garden salad of the year. It was just a perfect "Fiona-sized salad", made up of 6 or 8 shoots of fresh chive, a few snippets of fresh parsley, the first harvest of garden cress, planted 2 weeks ago, the tiny slices of the radish thinnings from her garden plot and two chive flowers as garnish. Served up with Fiona's favourite ranch salad dressing it was a fitting way to celebrate a round out a busy gardening day.

The GRUBS had a wonderful afternoon together. First we planted out about half of the seedlings that we had started in early April. There was a bumper crop of pickling cucumbers and basil, healthy numbers of lettuces and assorted other things, many of which had been labelled under conditions of relative chaos and were clearly not what they said they were, but could not be identified. So a number of mystery plants.

Then we went for a tour at the home of a "friend of the GRUBS". R. is a real-life acquaintance of mine, and an on-line friend. We live just a few kilometers apart, read each other's blogs religiously and exchange ideas and inspiration but rarely meet in person. But she invited the GRUBS up to tour her luscious garden paradise amidst the rocky scree of her mountainside homestead and baited us with some magnificent seedlings of pepper and tomato varieties I'd been lusting after. The kids (and adults) also pored over her birds nest collection.

Then we headed back to the garden to transplant the new seedlings and finish planting out the innumerable basil sprouts in any vacant nooks and crannies we could find. We noticed that the post holes I had dug a mere 24" deep a couple of weeks ago had water in the bottoms of them. And the amazing thing was that they were not wet from rain or irrigation but from the rising lake level. Our garden is less than 24" from being flooded out completely! The water is very very high and levels here are uncontrolled (i.e. the lake and river are undammed). However, the lake is massive, and we are optimistic.

I came home with a few dozen baby basils. Somewhere amidst the weeds in the fallow garden beds at home I will find a place for them.