Our spring and summer vegetables are off to a great start this year. The early June kitchen garden isn’t always this promising but we’ve had an exceptionally lovely spring, just enough rain and many warm, sunny days to encourage speedy seed germination and quick growth of transplants.  Even a travel schedule that had us away several times through April and May didn’t hold slow down the garden.

The bed of spring vegetables I planted April 30 is providing radishes, lettuce, chard and turnips with beets and carrots in the wings.  A second bed of these spring delights that I planted May 23^rd will be producing in another few weeks, just as the first bed winds down.

The sugar snap peas seeded indoors March 3^rd and set out March 14^th have topped the trellis and are covered in white blossoms and the first few peas, both promising lots of sweet, crunchy pea flavor very soon.   I’ve hilled and mulched the potatoes and the earliest fingerlings have blossom buds forming.  Peas and potatoes will be a late June treat.  And in the onion bed the rows of sweetly pungent purplette spring onions are beginning to bulb.

Looking farther ahead to summer meals, tomato and pepper plants are blossoming and setting fruit and eggplant isn’t far behind.  Zucchini is putting on leaves and will soon outstrip this summer trio in size and production.  And beans and corn planted May 14^th germinated quickly in our lovely warm spring, their leaves now spreading out and up. The first pole bean vines are reaching for their strings and the corn is on its way to knee high or higher by the Forth of July.

I don’t know what weather is ahead for July and August but if summer continues the pattern set by spring, we have some glorious meals ahead.