I picked 8 more peas today, 5 snap/sugar snap peas and 3 shelling/soup peas (the most shelling peas yet, and the first two of the purple ones, with at least 3 more purple ones looking almost ready to pick). Pea production really slowed down for a bit there in the warmer weather but it seems to be picking back up. It looks like ‘Golden Sweet’ produced some new pods and flowers in the warmer, sunnier weather we had for a couple days there, lending a bit more credence to my educated-guess theory that my ‘Golden Sweet’ stock, being from India, dislikes truly chilly (for June) and gloomy and rainy weather, unlike typical garden peas grown in the US and Britain. And the fava/braod beans are going crazy! Literally every time I check them, there are new baby pods starting to grow and new flowers. The bean ‘Yellow Arikara’ is putting out blooms like mad, with several new flowers every day, and the first two cultivars of purple-podded beans have buds on them, ‘Purple Podded’ and ‘Trionfo Violetto.’ The scarlet runner beans have climbed ever higher. After being budded for at least a few weeks (probably more), the cinquefoil (a perennial flower) finally opened its first bloom today. It even looks like the cardinal climber (a tender ornamental vine) might have some buds forming, which would be interesting as it took significantly longer into the summertime last year for it to develop any.
The largest penstemon that I’ve planted this year is still putting out scads of new blooms in a beautiful coral color, and at least some of the bumblebees have finally figured out that they produce nectar and pollen, and have started going crazy for them! It’s rare for me to walk past the plant during the day and not see a bee (usually a bumblebee) at a flower. It was last year, with the agastaches, that I first realized that bees sometimes have to learn how to seek nectar and/or pollen from flowers they have not encountered before, as (as I wrote here at the time) some of the bees figured out how to feed at the agastache flowers and others left the plants without realizing that they could do so. By the way, I’ve been seeing a lot of bumblebees and small native bees, and a pretty good amount of hover flies and other pollinating wasps/flies, but I’m seeing almost no honeybees in my own garden or other neighborhood gardens. Last year there were fewer than previous years, but this year it’s dropped even more. It’s not very common for me to see them outside of a nursery or a very large garden open to the public any more.
Today is back to chilly (for June) and grey weather, and there’s a chance it’ll rain today. That’s OK as I’ve got a lot of non-garden stuff I need to do today anyhow. I hope the warm-weather legumes I planted over the past couple days (cowpeas, limas, yard-long beans, hyacinth beans, and more; see the previous two entries) fare OK in this colder soil.
