Garden: 2011
With a cold, rainy, blustery start to the gardening season, all my seedlings have gotten off to a slow start. Now things are finally starting to poke through, though, and so I thought I’d post some pictures.
This is the year I stay on top of the garden!
Uh-huh.
I talked myself into a “babystep” of sorts, though. My husband thought that not planting all the garden area would be a good baby step, but I just couldn’t bring myself to let all that potential dirt just lie there. This year I am foregoing the summer crops. No tomatoes, no zucchini. None of the crops that get wildly out of hand if ignored for a few days in August.
I have already done really well with the spring crops, and they are some of our favorites anyway, so this year I want to try a spring garden and a fall garden. What I have going now will probably produce until the beginning of July or so, then I get a month or so off, then I plant the next round of all the cool-weather crop sometime in August. It is possible, then, that they will produce until Thanksgiving, but we’ll just have to see for ourselves.
So, here we go:
I think there might be carrots and green onions in there somewhere. But it’s mostly all weeds.
Some sort of seed spill or blowing happened here. I don’t know if they are squash or cucumber or raddichio (which I’ve never done before) or sunflower. But I planted sunflowers nearby and very few are coming up, so my first bet is on sunflower. This happened last year with carrot seeds. Sigh. But there were no non-windy days to plant!
Matt’s venture this year is grapes. He planted 24 twigs and has gotten in the posts for trellis. Hopefully the little twigs don’t die.
Main crops: sugar snap peas (I planted lots!), bush beans, lettuces (a mixture of looseleaf varieties), spinach, turnips, green onions, basil, dill, thyme, cucumbers, onions.
New to me this year: carrots, beets, sorrel, swiss chard, raddichio, chives, leeks, shallots, summer savory, raspberries, grapes. I plan to plant garlic in the fall, also.
This is the time of year where hope starts leafing out, and it is hard to imagine that this entire area will be covered with tall, flowering weeds in a couple months. No, no, it won’t be this year!
It won’t.
Really.
I love garden posts. I can’t wait to see how it all “grows up” in time. I’m particularly interested in the grapes. We used to live nextdoor to an ancient Italian man who grew grapes! :)
We know all about seed packet spills here…sadly…
I just wish I could tell what plant the spilled seeds are! I planted a couple new-to-me salad greens near that spot, and sunflowers, and cucumbers are within the range of possibilities. I’ve pulled a few and smelled them, torn leaves and smelled them, and yesterday I even chewed on a leaf! I am pretty sure they aren’t cucumbers, in fact, I can’t see that any of my cucumbers came up. I determined that they aren’t sorrel, which is the green I don’t want to miss, but based on the taste I sure hope it wasn’t the Asian green I decided to try. But the leaf is a bit fuzzy, too.
Last year I had some sunflower seeds scatter, and the plant was three feet tall before I decided that yes, it must be a sunflower. :)
I need a seedling-identification expert to come over. I also am not sure if a few seedlings are beets (which I’ve not grown before) or weeds. :)
It is hard to believe there will be real food coming out of the garden at this point. Gardening is still new enough to me that I find it simply baffling at this time of year that it “really works.” :)
I enlarged the photo and gave it a second look. I’m pretty sure they’re sunflowers…which means you’ll definitely want to thin them if you don’t want a forest! :)
Thank you!! :) We’ll see if I can manage to transplant them to where I wanted them.