Signs of the Season - Peonies!

I may enjoy watching the seasons change at my local greenmarket almost as much as I do out on Jamaica Bay. I got my first strawberries of the year on Sunday (one of the stalls had them before that, I think on Memorial Day weekend, but the first ones of the year sold out way before I made it to the market), and although I'm not a frequent purchaser of flowers, the stand where I got the berries and some apples had the most glorious peonies. I just had to bring some home.

Can't WAIT for the first corn on the cob, peaches, and tomatoes of the season!

I'm looking forward to produce from my own little garden at Sebago, too. It's been a really good Spring with plenty of rain and everything's just shooting up. I actually tried my first carrots from the garden yesterday. Carrots are a new thing I'm trying this year since I've decided that pole beans (which I tried as a climber after we started losing cucumbers to some sort of mildew that had gotten into the soil at the club) are a little too unruly for a garden I don't get to every day - seems like one week they would be innocent little things climbing up their poles just like on the seed packet, and then the next week I would go to the club find that they'd heaped up on each other, pulled down the poles, were making a determined grab at the tomato cages (and of course the poor defenseless tomato plants inside those cages) and just generally going nuts. The hooligans! So this year, carrots instead of beans. 

Didn't mean to be sampling my carrots just yet, but I went to the club to finish the gel coat work on my keel strip, which I'd mostly done on Thursday but messed up in a couple of spots when I got impatient to go home and tried to put my boat away myself (there were paddlers out on the water and I should've just waited for them to get back). I did my touch-ups, then let the boat sit out in the sun for a while I went to weed my garden. I accidentally pulled up a couple of carrots with the weeds - they were maybe an inch and a half long and less than a quarter inch thick but they were recognizably carrots and so I rinsed 'em off and ate them and they were quite good.

Chard, beets, basil, and tomatoes all coming along nicely, too.

Oh, and speaking of the keel strip (click here for keel strip post if you missed that, this is the biggest repair I've done on my boat so of course there's a good kayak geek post about it) - it worked! The gel coat is kind of a finishing touch, the fiberglass tape epoxied to the keel is the main thing, so despite wanting to clean up the gel coat where I'd smeared it, I did take the Romany out for the trip leader training class we had at the club on Saturday. I opened the aft hatch during a beach stop and was absolutely delighted to find that the compartment was once again bone dry for the first time in a long time. I'm pretty happy with how that all went - would've been nice if I'd had the sense to not try to move it by myself when the gel coat was still wet on Thursday, but all in all not bad for my first try.