This week, the bean plants put out their first baby beans, the grapevines finally got a trellis, the peas finally bit the dust, and all that rain brought some mushrooms to my magnolias. All that and more, in pictures, after the jump. 

First, can we just spend a little more time with that baby bean photo? How cute are those beans? I’m looking forward to them growing up and all, but, gosh, they’re adorable right now. Okay, gushing over baby beans complete. Let’s move on, but let’s stick with cute things for a while, shall we? I really love these mushroom caps:

They popped up in the magnolia tree container on Wednesday. Certainly, they’re a sign that the garden has been getting plenty (and even maybe too much) water with all the rain this week, but they’re also a sign that the soil in that container has a good fungal network going. And fungal networks are great for trees, since they help make nutrients more accessible to the tree’s roots. So hoorah for the cute mushroom caps! They’ll dry up when the rainy spell passes, but, hopefully, the fungi in the soil will keep on trucking.

Next up, I was pretty excited about this trellis:

My grapevines needed something to climb, and I spotted this guy on Ebay for $70. The only trouble was that my Ebay account was still set to ship to my old apartment in the West Village. Oops. After I sent a sad note to the seller telling her my trellis never arrived, she informed me that it certainly had. I checked the address, and blam. Feelings of total idiocy. Fortunately, the package was still hanging out in the lobby of the old building. I hauled it home on the subway, both because six-foot trellises don’t really fit in cabs and because having to carry a giant box home from Manhattan felt like my just desserts after such a lame-brained internet shopping mistake. ANYHOW, I tied the grapevines to the trellis that very afternoon, and I think they’re looking pretty good! I can’t wait to see how far they get before winter.

Speaking of trellises, I built supports for all the cucumber plants.

Turns out, cucumber plants spread. A lot. They’re big guys! I didn’t have the horizontal space for them, so I decided to take them vertical. So far so good. I’m hoping for pictures of adorable baby cucumbers for next week.

And finally, a farewell. The late-season miracle peas are no longer with us.

The harvest was pretty slim — pretty much just a single handful of pods, but, boy, were they good. R.I.P. little peas.

Tags: beans, cucumbers, fungi, grapevines, mushrooms, peas, trellis