Purple asparagus!

We're trying a new variety of asparagus -- purple passion. The first sprouts are just coming up.

We had a hard freeze two nights ago. I brought in one semi-hardy plant from my deck but forgot I'd put the rosemary out in the garden. Fortunately, it survived. So did the sugar-snap peas (not so surprising) and radishes and dill and onions and garlic. The tatsoi is almost ready for harvest and is absolutely loving the cool, wet weather. (That may be our new shorthand for cool and wet: "Will the tatsoi weather ever improve?")

The new (to us) variety of garlic isn't looking all that great. They're tremendously uneven, with a few really pitiful patches in the row. Normally, I'd attribute it to an area of less fertile soil, but the old (to us) variety is growing more uniformly in a parallel row just a few inches away, which makes me wonder if the patches of anemic plants all grew from the cloves of a single head, and the variety just has more than typically uneven vigor from plant to plant, head to head. If that's true, I wouldn't recommend the variety for the basic crop, but it does offer extra-early harvest, so it may be worth putting up with the uneven growth in a crop that's only intended to provide for a short period when the prior year's harvest is completely gone and it's too early for the current year's main crop.