Strawberry Against Blue

Last week I featured a radish; this week here are homegrown strawberries. Can you guess what the bright blue background is?

Last week I featured a radish; this week here are homegrown strawberries. Can you guess what the bright blue background is?

Red radish grown in my garden, May 2010
Prepare your soil. Dig it up a few times and mix in some organic matter such as compost or an organic mix-in available at a plant nursery or Home Depot. Either plant your seeds 3 inches apart or be sure to pull out seedlings that are too close together when they germinate. Put some compost on top of the germinated seedling about a week or two after germinating. Watch until a red ball appears in the ground, and then pull out your pretty red radish. Photograph the radish for Mary’s Ruby Tuesday meme.
For more photos with a little or a lot of red, visit:

Learn how to make delicious pickled radishes (made with umeboshi paste).

Stonecrop in my garden April 2010
and next week is FOOD (Meals, Restaurants, Eating, Vegetables, Unusual Foods, Cooking, BBQs,…)

Photo of my compost, taken in March 2009
Do you have a garden? What is your favorite and your least favorite part of gardening?

Last week for the first time in almost ten years I had the opportunity to go cross-country skiing while my daughter and her friends were sledding. The red hydrant behind the skis is what qualifies this photo for Ruby Tuesday, a photo meme where you post any photo with some red. And this was before our bigger storm that dumped over a foot of snow. Strangely, the Boston area, which I visited this past weekend and is over five hours drive north of our area of New Jersey, had very little snow.
I learned a good gardening tip on Saturday night while driving from Newton, MA to Marlboro, MA (we were invited to a laser tag party). If one of your small trees gets a lot of snow on it, brush it off with a long broom as soon as you can. Otherwise, the snow may permanently bend the tree into an unhealthy shape. If that does happen, you may have to trim the tree and wait years until it gets back a normal shape.

Echinacea (cone flowers) with Rudbeckia (yellow spots) behind
For more Summer Stock Sunday posts, visit Robin at Around the Island.