So, it's been almost three months, and we have a pretty solid garden going! Nothing has started to produce any sort of mini-vegetable yet, but we're waiting super anxiously for that to happen! In the meantime, I thought I'd go ahead and introduce you to the not-so-little guys that are taking over our garden.
Up first, we have the green beans!
We had an initial scare with these guys when only two of our four seeds sprouted. But, after a quick decision to plant four more seeds, we're now up to six green bean plants because all four of the second planting seeds sprouted!
Up next we have spinach!
If I remember correctly, we have three of these plants left. All six of our seeds sprouted, but somehow we lost a few. The three that are growing look good and healthy--although Darrell and I realized that we don't have a clue as to when to harvest spinach since it's just the leaves, so we might end up treating it like our herbs and just picking off a handful of leaves once the plant has enough to sustain itself without them. We'll figure it out through trial and error!
Finishing off the first row is broccoli!
These guys have gotten pretty darn big. And we've got two of them. Definitely looking forward to a solid broccoli crop.
We also have lots of pepper plants!
Six seedlings got transplanted into our garden, and only one of them didn't survive the transplant. Comparatively, these plants are not showing as much growth as the other ones, but we've had a really mild summer so far, and we think that is definitely affecting our peppers. Hopefully we'll see some major gains this week as highs are supposed to be near ninety all week. All five plants are bell peppers because we cook with those all the time--and given the opportunity I would definitely snack on a red pepper raw!
Next up are our tomatoes!
Like the peppers, one of the tomato plants didn't survive the transplant, so we only have three tomato plants. But I'm pretty sure that will be more than enough tomatoes for the two of us. We did finally get cages to put on them, and just in the nick of time because some of the stalks already seem to be pretty weighted down!
Lastly, we have the space-hogs of our garden, the zucchini/squash plants!
You know that information they give you on the back of seed packets telling you how much space to allow for each plant? Turns out that's pretty accurate information. We have six squash plants (two zucchini, two summer squash, and two winter squash), and I'm pretty sure that given the opportunity they'd take over the entire garden plot. My farm-raised mom said that it shouldn't hurt our crop much if we have to trim back the vines so they don't kill our other plants, so we'll see.
We do currently have one mystery plant growing. When we put seeds into our indoor container, two of the sections contained green onion seeds. We only had luck with one of them sprouting, so before moving the plants outside we added some green onion seeds to the other section, as well as a few around it in the plot since supposedly green onion don't take up that much space. Well, it seems that none of the other seeds sprouted, but the seedling that had started growing inside? It's out of control.
Furthermore, every website that I've looked at online does not have any pictures even closely resembling that plant in their green onion (or any other onion) seedling section. But--it's growing directly out of the container that was started indoors, so unless a foreign seed got into the seed packet, it has to be green onion. Right? My mom reassured me that it isn't a weed, so we've decided to just let it grow a little bit more and see what happens. If you have any insight I'd be glad to hear it!
And, to wrap things up, here's our full garden in all it's glory!
I'm already starting to dream about next year and the possibility of doubling the size of our plot so we can plant some melons and sweet corn, but I suppose we'll see how things go this year first!
