Wild Arugula

One of our most popular specialty crops is wild arugula Arugula Rustica. One of the seed catalogues we buy from says that it is the true Italian arugula. We do like it better than the common variety, it is tastier and spicier. It is a perennial rather than an annual like the garden variety and we let it seed itself all over the garden and just weed around it.
The flowers are yellow instead of white and it makes quite a big bush if you leave it alone. The bees also love the flowers so that it is providing a late nectar crop. We call it feral arugula for the way it has come to grow all over the farm. Harvesting it means hunting it out among the lilies and dahlias and beets.

We are about to take off for the last outdoor Farmers Market of the year. The weather is cloudy and it keeps threatening to rain but it isn't really cold. In two weeks we'll start the winter market, this year indoors in the high school commons.

Blooming plants inside and out

We have this Christmas cactus on the windosill over the sink. it blooms beautifuuly when it is suppossed to, between Thanksgiving and Christmas but then the silly thing keeps putting out a few buds every few weeks after that. this last bunch of flowers came out just a few days ago.
Outside the Asian pears are beginning to bloom. This is an especially pretty little tree with yellow green leaves bordered in a reddish color with the pretty white blossoms. Our oldest daughter has been giving us trees for our birthdays the last several years. Both of our birthdays are in the two weeks after Christmas so no one is particularly interested in parties, etc. We love getting the trees. She's sent us several apples, four hazelnuts, several Asian pears and a peach, a pluot (a cross between an apricot and a plum) and two tea bushes over the years.

The First Warm Day

It was such a lovely day, the first warm day in ever so long. I sat on the back porch preparing rag strips for weaving and had to take off my sweater and put on sun screen as my face was feeling way too hot. Had to search for the sun screen as it's been so long since it was needed. I know that before long I'll be complaining that it is too hot. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest anything over 75 degrees makes me feel faint.

I thinned seedlings in the greenhouse. The picture above is a flat of aster seedlings. I hate thinning as I'm always sure I'm throwing out the prettiest ones, but long experience has taught me that if I don't give plants enough room to grow they don't do well. If you are thinning plants where all the seedlings are the same color you want to choose the strongest plant, but if you have a mixture of colors, the pastel ones can be smaller and paler so you want to be careful to leave some big ones and some small ones or you may end up with all purple.

Joel planted 120 strawberry plants that our daughter brought us from the mainland. Partly June bearing Shuksan and partly the day neutral varieties Seascape and Tristar that will fruit all summer and into the fall.

I also finally got started weaving the next batch of rag rugs. These will be my rainbow rugs with the colors in color wheel order. The warp is stripes of purple, red-purple, red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, and blue.
The rag strips are the same colors. It takes quite a while to collect all the colors I need to do this pattern so I don't do it very often. I can dye some of the missing colors but this time I found every one that I needed at the thrift store over the winter.