Garden Update: Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

...and that sentence will not finish with "the more you eat, the more you toot". At least not in this instance!

I neglected weeding the garden this weekend in favor of other, more enjoyable activities, but still took some photos showing the main garden's progress as far as my (new) seed babies are concerned. It's been just over two weeks since we put the garden in, and most everything is starting to sprout!

The peas (on the left, on either side of the wire fencing) are popping up in nice neat little rows. Can't wait until they're tall enough to start climbing! The beans (right) are also doing really well...for some reason the left row came in faster, but even the "bald" spots in the right row have areas where the dirt is being pushed aside to make for bean plants. I'm sure I'll have a nice crop of beans this year!

The cauliflower (left) is up as well, as far as I can tell. The seedlings are kind of mixed in with the weeds and plant debris (which is a result of rototilling a garden that hasn't been maintained in two years - it should be better next year), and the zucchini is coming in quite nicely, and large like the bean plants.

For the four rows of carrots (left, noted by the white row markers), I can't tell if they've decided to make an appearance yet, as carrot seedlings are so tiny. At this point, I'm just going to let them grow amongst the weeds, and once everything's a bit bigger, I'll try and differentiate. Don't worry, I plan on weeding the rest of the garden soon! And last but not least, the potatoes - R's babies are up! They're not big or bushy yet either, but I definitely think they have the potential to be!

I can't tell if the cilantro and garlic chives are up, so I didn't take a picture of those.

And some bonus, non-veggie garden pics for you - my bleeding hearts (left) are doing quite well, this one is bushing up more and more, so hopefully I'll get to see some blooms this year! The hostas (right) are all getting big, too, but the exciting thing is that the other three plants in the top left corner of the front flower bed (all bulbs) have popped out! They were a little slow on the pick-up, but they're here now!

I can't wait until I have some blooms happening!

Garden Update: The Hostas are Rising

I figured since the last pictures I posted of the potted plants were from a week or two ago, it would be prudent to post some more recent photos of some of the growth we've had in both the flower beds and the pots. The peppers and tomatoes are doing nicely, and the hostas are coming up in full force in the front flower bed. Some of the other perennials that we planted are taking a bit longer to get growing, but that's to be expected, since some of them were bulbs and not active roots.

As you can see, there's a random lily growing in there as well (photo on the left). I'm not sure what kind it is, but it'll be a nice surprise once it blooms. The other existing plant is what my mom and I figure is columbine (the bushy plants in the photo on the right)...again, I have no idea what color it'll be, but I'm sure it'll look good.

I'm super excited about how my basil is doing (left), as it has practically doubled in size since we moved it into the big pot it's in now. Basil can apparently be pretty picky, so it's nice to see that it's not drowning or dying of thirst. The Thai chilis are starting to come in now, too (right), and it'll be fun to eventually make some Thai curry or something using those.

Last but not least are the serranos (left) and Sweet Heat chilis (right). This is only one of the five serrano plants, but it's pretty indicative of how all five are doing - the peppers are getting quite large, and there are more growing all the time. The Sweet Heat chilis are getting quite large, too, but I think I'll wait to harvest them until they're ripe/red.

Not too much action on any of the tomatoes yet, but a couple of the plants have flowers on them already, so I anticipate that there will soon be fruit forming on those.

The vegetable garden hasn't sprouted anything yet, but it has only been about a week since it was planted, and seed germination times are usually around ten to 15 days. Perhaps there'll be something by next weekend!

Garden Update: The Garden Is In!

I kind of dropped the ball on updating about my plant babies, didn't I? There's a good reason for that, however: they're all dead. The weekend before May Long, I transplanted the babies into bigger pots and started bringing them outside for increasing periods of time (or at least that was the plan). Unfortunately, it either rained too much or the babies just weren't ready for that yet, and they all died. So I decided to go with Plan B and ended up purchasing any of the plants I want to grow this year.

I'll give you a run-down of what I've been up to garden-wise since my little seedlings bit the dust...

Weekend of May 17 to 19 (the May Long Weekend)

R was away bear hunting for this particular weekend, so I took the liberty of vacating my dead seedlings from all my pots and decided that I'd purchase some flowering annuals for them, to add a bit of prettiness to the backyard. 

I found a great deal on geraniums from Costco (six 3" pots of them for $10) and also grabbed a planter already filled with gorgeous dark purple daisy-like flowers for another $17. There wasn't anything else I liked at Costco, so I went to Canadian Tire for the rest of what I had decided I needed. The Canadian Tire in my little suburb is actually a really good store, as opposed to so many others I've visited before (hometown Crappy Tire, I'm looking at you!) and I managed to get the rest of the flowers I needed for about $30.

I planted all my flowers into their corresponding pots, and they ended up looking great! Yay for flowers!

Weekend of May 24 to 25

I did a lot of garden stuff this particular weekend, and R was around to help this time. We first went to a local greenhouse that specializes in tomatoes and hot peppers to pick up some serrano peppers and maybe tomatoes to put in the extra pots I had. There ended up being a deal on the tomato and pepper plants - buy 12 for $3.50 each, otherwise they were $4 each. So I purchased seven hot pepper plants (five serranos, one Thai hot pepper and one Sweet Heat) and five tomato plants (Roma, Zebra, Black Krump, Pineapple, and I forget the last one). I also got three basil plants (to eventually make home made pesto!) so the total bill came out to $56. Not bad, considering these plants were mostly six inches or taller. Anyways, we planted all these plants into pots (easily movable if the weather goes crappy) after I bought more pots and dirt from Canadian Tire.

We also cleaned up both the side and front flower beds, and planted the perennials I had previously ordered from Costco online (seriously great deal on hostas and a mixed perennial "set"). This took a couple hours, but it was worth it because everything looked so much better when we were done, even though none of the plants had come up yet.

Weekend of May 31 to June 1

This was the most recent and most time- and labor-intensive gardening weekend to date. We rented a small rototiller to clean up the back vegetable garden, which had been neglected for a couple of years. Man, was it a mess! Took way longer to get all cleaned up than I wanted it to, and there's still lots of crab grass and dandelion roots in the soil, but hopefully those will disappear and/or die. We also put up a fence around the garden since the dog likes to eat veggies and dig, and S and K are getting a puppy right away, so we don't want it in the garden, either. Finally, we planted! Ross put in his potatoes, and I put in peas, tendergreen beans, zucchini, purple cauliflower, red and purple carrots, and some garlic chives and cilantro. Hopefully it'll all grow!

And now, to share some pictures...

 

As you can see, the plants are significantly larger than my pathetic seedlings would have been, so I think this might be the way to go for plants next year, as well. Especially since the greenhouse I got the tomatoes/peppers at also normally grows tomatillos, he was just out. Perhaps I can request he grow a certain number of plants just for me! :)

I'll post more about the garden when I can, as these pictures are now from about a week ago.