After last Tuesday morning’s lovely and much needed rain, I traveled Middle Road around lunch time. There were an inordinate number of birds on the road. I wondered whether there could be tons of worms on the road trying to warm up after the rain. One of life’s little mysteries, I suppose.

Last week I mentioned I ate a couple of Sugar Ann snap peas. This week I had a few English ones. They were the knight variety. I love opening them right in the field and scooping out the baby peas.

I hated peas as a child. I do not believe I ever had a fresh or frozen one. My mother was a cook who opened cans of vegetables. I never ate them at home. However, at the Earl H. Hyatt Elementary School in Rew, Penn., we were forced to sit in the cafeteria until we ate every thing put on our trays. I have a bad memory of taking those wizened, yellowed, canned peas as if they were pills, chased down with sips from my milk carton. I think it was the last time I bought a school lunch. I may have eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of my grade school years.

Nevertheless, I grew up, made a garden, grew peas and ate them raw happily.

I had a very nice tree peony for years. This year it has turned into an herbaceous one. Apparently it died over the winter and sprouted a regular peony on the root stock on which it had been grafted. This happens sometimes with roses: what was once a pink or yellow suddenly becomes a muddy red.

Why, I wonder, do I purchase sweet potato slips in mid-winter with an imagination that everything will be perfect? Every year, I am completely disappointed. For starters, they do not arrive until after June 1, and come as a single stem with a tiny root no more than an eighth of an inch long.

The one year I had a great crop I planted my own from store bought, cut and balanced in water on toothpicks.

I have a new favorite shade annual: Plectranthus. Heather Gardens has the cultivar velvet Elvis. It has a dark green leaf with purple under each leaf. It blooms a beautiful blue in late summer right through fall.

Every year I bring in my geraniums. They look pretty dismal all winter in a back room. About a month ago I cleaned them up, fertillized and set the pots here and there in the perennial bed. I use black plastic pots which are completely hidden in the neighboring foliage. They are blooming now and really perk up the late spring border.

Thanks to my daughter and granddaughter, the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants were finally set free from their plastic pots. Hopefully they will come around. Fortunately we have a warm late fall, so they should have a chance to ripen.

I’ve been pulling entire cabbage plants even though they have yet to form heads. No matter the outer leaves are delicious, and I’ve been pretending they are kale and using them accordingly.

It was incredible and very moving to watch former stand-up comic and host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart, take on the United States Congress this week.

He has long been an advocate for the first responders to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. They are suffering the effects of the terrible toxic air after the buildings fell for nearly twenty years.

He called out the members of Congress for their shameful hypocritical behavior in their foot-dragging response to funding health care for those responders.

Let me just mention members of Congress get government-funded health care for the rest of their lives.