April Showers Bring June Flowers!

Well its already been a month and its time for another garden update!
You can review what the garden last looked like here. Now it looks like this:

The corn is knee-high and the cukes and pumpkins are crawling all over the place.


A three week-long campaign against the slugs paid off. After nightly strikes with a flashlight and a box of salt they no longer eat anything in the garden.

And the beans have proved eager to make me look like an ignorant city-slicker yet again. Last year some of you may remember I built a fantastic trellis for my beans only to discover a few weeks later that I had bought bush beans, not pole beans. This year I just planted the purple beans we eat and sat back. Our neighbor visited this week and declared that these were pole beans and indeed needed a trellis! I, silly American, asked where I might buy the materials needed for a trellis. Being the sweet woman she is, Tamara did not laugh at me as she turned and started ripping branches off the nearby fig trees.

Everything is blossoming:

From Left to Right: Onion, Bean, Cucumber, Poppies
And hints of a feast to come are beginning to arrive:

Left to Right: First Tomatoes, Strawberries and baby Walnuts.

My next door neighbor and the mother of a friend have both graciously agreed to teach me how to can my tomatoes in August. Things like canning and making jam and yogurt and cheese are things most anyone here knows how to do and something I really want to learn.

Which brings me to some thinking I've been doing about food and socioeconomics. Everyone here has at least 5 food bearing trees in their yards and many have vegetables. I was admiring this at a friend's place and her mother asked, "Don't Americans have fruit trees?".
Me: "I don't know, not really." I don't remember people having them.
Her: "Why not?"
Me: ummm...Do I even try to explain a covenant neighborhood? "I don't know."
Her: "I think they must be very lazy."
Me: "Oh no! People plant trees all the time! My dad has planted at least 8 trees in our yard, just none of them have fruit!"
Her: "Why? What kind of trees are they?"
Me: "ummm, pretty trees?"

When it comes down to it, I think it must be more of a cost-benefit thing. But then again, my parents blueberries never seemed to be all that much work. I've heard rumblings that as the "crisis" deepens people are becoming much more interested in growing their own food. Is it that we've just gotten too rich to bother? I'd love to hear anyone else's ideas on this subject.