My Pursuit of Youthful Living: Garden Update

My last post was to assure everyone that I have my fair share of gardening oopsies and failures. Now on to the good stuff happening outside!

Of all the things we tried planting for the first time this year, the only ones that seem happy are the onions and eggplant. The eggplant seems to be doing well. Something's munching on the leaves but not as bad as on the cauliflower & brussel sprouts.

Eggplant - getting attacked by something

I have no idea what onion is supposed to do, or if I should have divided them, or when they're ready - but they look healthy to me.

Onion

I had better success than I expected with starting from seed. Granted, the season isn't over so I don't know if they will produce fruit - but so far they haven't withered and died! I mentioned in the last post that the rosemary never even sprouted and the radish were hit & miss, but the rest seems to be coming along. This year's seed starters included basil, carrots, cucumber, and garlic.

The basil seems to be doing pretty well. They're not big and bushy yet, as seedlings would have been, but they are definitely past the dying stage so I'm pretty sure we'll have a good amount of basil by the time the tomatoes start fruiting!

I have no idea what to look for in carrots. Here's the tops - they look good to me but as I found with radish, I won't really know until they're ready for harvest.

Carrot tops

The cucumber looks better every day. I'm not used to it being so small but it started from seed in May. I'm hoping it has a chance to develop fruit before it gets too hot for it to survive.

Cucumber looking happy!

The garlic has also been harvested already - and early. The general rule of thumb for garlic is to harvest on 4th of July, but the signs of readiness include completely died back tops. When we returned home from vacation, that's what we saw (except one plant that still had one lonely partially green blade, lol). We had a very warm winter, a sliver of spring, and summer-like weather since mid April. So I'm thinking it was just ready early this season. We haven't tried any yet since it's still curing but they look like the same stuff you'd get at the store so I think it turned out okay.


As of March	Harvested May 25th

Finally, an update on the "typical" plants. They all look nice and healthy. I picked the first flowers off the tomatoes to encourage more plant growth. I've had a few people mention they've already had tomatoes from their gardens this season and I have to admit, I'm a bit jealous!


Tomato plants	Pepper fruiting!

The peas have already come and gone. I started a second round at the end of April like like did last year, but it was too blasted hot and they are just hanging out at about 5-8 inches tall. I need to just go ahead and rip them out and feed the composting bin. I'm a little bummed about our shortened Spring.

The lettuce is doing great other than the one container getting munched on by whatever (deer?). The romaine and spinach both really took off.


More lettuce mix and Romaine	Spinach

Overall, the flowers aren't going as well as I'd hoped but some are popping up and that's a plus in my book! The alyssum is flourishing like crazy! There's also snapdragons, nasturtium, and something else I haven't identified yet.