Fresh greens and perky pinks

My garden is taking up a lot of my time and thought these days, not to mention a good portion of my daily energy. I've slowly been planting it and, because spring has been so slow in coming, the few seeds that have sprouted look kinda pathetic. Even my dozen tomato and pepper plants look like they could make it, or not. A crazy squirrel keeps jumping into the half bourbon barrel on the porch and munching away at the tops to my radishes, leaving me to pry out the ready produce without the benefit of leaves to grab onto.

On the plus side, my peas and strawberries are looking promising, as are two rows of baby lettuces, a short row of Russian Red Kale, and some of my herbs.

I know there will be days late in the summer when I can't haul all the harvest into the house in a single trip. There will even come a time when I will be leaving baskets of produce at friends' back doors, ringing doorbells and running away so they can't refuse my overflow. But for now, I'm grateful for the few snippets of fresh greens and perky pinks that I can gather in a small bowl.

From today's meager gathering, I made a salad for lunch; saving out a half dozen strawberries for Ed to put over his mid-day bowl of vanilla ice cream. Lunch doesn't get any fresher than 10 minutes from the garden to the plate. I swear it tastes 10 times better than those plastic packages of mixed greens from Kroger and strawberries from California.

I'll take what I can get today, and look forward to a more boutiful harvest in coming weeks.