The "Golden" Radish

We returned to Chicagoland yesterday after ten days at the northern camp, and were delighted to find our very modest garden in full splendor. I had been fertilizing before the trip, and had constructed my own "Rube Goldberg" watering system. Both seemed to have worked well in our absence.

The tomatoes and peppers are covered with blossoms, the cucumbers are starting to spread out across the garden, and today we picked lettuce and radishes! In fact, our dinner salads were made up totally from our own garden. Five different mixed greens and some very sweet radishes that were almost golf ball size and not mealy at all. Can't get much fresher than that!

The "payoff", if we use that term to describe our early bounty, would be a misnomer for sure. Because of the fertilizer, the watering apparatus, the rabbit fencing, the cages and supports, etc., those salads probably cost more than had we ordered them in the main dining room at The Tavern on the Green! Oh well. Hard to put a price on the satisfaction of dropping some seeds in your own backyard and pulling them and shaking off the dirt a few weeks later. Makes them taste so much better somehow.