Garden Update: It has been a week.

The garden looks pretty good right now.  It still needs to fill in a lot to look really good, but things are coming along.  We had our first thievery this week.  When we planted our large Jalapeno plant it has a few small peppers on it already.  They are mysteriously gone now.  I didn't think they were ripe yet, but someone must have thought they were good enough.  I hope very much that this is not a yearlong problem.  It will make me sad.  I said at the beginning, that we are just doing it for fun and to make a beautiful garden, but it just feels icky, knowing that someone just decided to enter our garden while we weren't there and help them selves.  I can just picture them watching us tending the plants and saying to themselves, "those saps, they are working their rear ends off out there.  I am going to show them how stupid they are by just walking over and picking there stuff as soon as they are gone."

I sincerely hope that is not what is going on.  My aunt said it right.  I was telling our garden before we left that it should bite the persons hand off if they came back, but my kind hearted aunt added, "unless they are hungry.  Then you can let them have what they need."  She is so positive.  Here I was planning how to catch and punish the culprits, and she was thinking about people who would be desperate enough to steal produce.  Well, I hope the person was hungry and they needed the few calories and vitamins that those unripe peppers gave them.

Human scavengers are not our only problem, however.  We have some house sparrows eating off all of our lettuce now.  It keeps growing more leaves and getting wider, but not taller because all the leaves are eaten off about an inch off of the ground.  The edges are all jagged and pecked.  Very sad.  I had to thin it today, and did not get to keep any baby greens like I had been planning on.  I did however pick every other radish.  They are over an inch in diameter and were almost touching each other.  They are nice ans spicy too.  I will take some of them over to uncle Kevin. 

This picture is actually from last Thursday.  My aunt took them and sent them to me this weekend.  It is amazing how fast the radishes grew.

Here they are today, all ready to eat.

I had to add ties to the tomatoes because they have grown quite a bit and were starting to grow off sideways.

This is the top of the cherry tomato of the Sungold variety.  This one is actually two plants.  It came that way when we bought it at Bimart.  I tied those tops over to the stake and now it is strait as an arrow.  All the other tomatoes have grown quite a bit, also.  The little Roma is still pretty small.  I have no picture for that one, though.

Here is an updated picture of the washed out, radish/onion rainbow.  See the first two posts if you wonder what I am talking about.  The radishes on this side are considerably smaller than the other and the onions are also not as far along, but they are going to make a full recovery it seems.

This picture of the spinach and the lettuce is from last week as well.  The spinach is now much more full.  You can also sort of see the bird damage I was mentioning above.  They apparently prefer lettuce to spinach.

 This picture shows the cucumber starts that we planted last week.  We also planted cucumber seeds in the four hills you can see.  as of today at least one sprout has come up in each hill.  I didn't take a picture though.  The starts are turning a little yellow.  I have never had much luck with buying starts or vine plants like cucumbers, melons and squash.  That is why we also planted the seeds, for comparison and to hedge our bets.  The seeds are spacemaster (a.k.a. bushmaster).  My mom recommends them.  You can also see the early girl tomato in the background.  All of the tomatoes and peppers now have stakes as well as tomato cages.  My parents had a bunch of old bent up cages laying around on there property, and I scavenged them.  I had to use hedge trimmers to cut the vines that were growing over the pile of them.  My dad made some wonderful strong tomato cages a few years ago, from welded rebar, but I didn't want them to get stolen, so I went with the old bent up store bought ones.

Here we are looking down on the scarlet runner beans.  This is a week old picture, as well.  They are now starting to send out the climbing stems and get second and third leaf pairs.  They will be so beautiful when they are blooming and covering the fence with dark green foliage.

Here are the peas.  They are not doing very well.  I think it is just too hot for them.  We planted them very late and our garden spot is between sidewalk concrete and parking lot asphalt.  It is going to be wonderful for the heat loving things like the peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, but the peas, not so much.  When these finally give up the ghost, either voluntarily or by force, the pumpkin vine will be trained over to grow in their place.  The pumpkin seeds we planted a week and a half ago still have not come up.  I hope they do soon.

This is last weeks picture of the bush bean rectangle.  You can see that almost all of them sprouted and have their true leaves showing.  Do not be concerned about the varying colors.  Remember we planted a mix of three bush beans (the Tricolor mix package).  You can tell them apart at this stage.  They also did not come up at the same time.  The purpler looking ones came up first, then the paler yellow ones followed by the normal looking green ones.  However, I am a little concerned after our visit to the garden today.  Several are now missing there tops.  I hope the birds have not, now developed a taste for bush been leaves as well.

The rest of this post will be an update on the porch containers.  They are really looking good.

Today I picked the last of these radishes to put with the thinned ones from the community garden.  Then I dug up the green onions and replanted the small or eaten off ones.  (my cat chewed on a few of these, you may be able to tell)  I may be able to get some small onions from these later.  The rest will be delicious in tomorrows dinner:

They look delicious.  That ridiculously shallow tub with no drainage holes is turning out to be a very fun experiment.  You can see that the tiny Roma tomato that was found in one of the pots is growing nicely, too.  I will have to buy yet another pot for that when it gets larger.  I am too attached to it now.

My hanging pots of nasturtiums are now hung from some very sturdy hooks I got at Lowe's.  The guy in the hardware section was very nice and helped me pick them out and told me how to put them up.  It worked out just right and they are very strong.  They were also the cheapest ones.  Awesome!

This old hanging pot is a little shabby, but when the plants get larger you won't even see it.

This is the heirloom variety, Belgian Delight, or something like that.  The plant is getting very large and looks very healthy.  It has had a few blooms, but I still can't really tell if they were pollinated or not.  I will just have to wait and see.

This is one of the small Romas that I split apart.  There were two in the pot.  Bonus!  They are both doing very well.  Actually, they are both doing much better than there non-twinned counterpart in the community garden.  That may be the difference between the required organicness of the community garden and my zealous applications of chemical fertilizer in my pots on the porch.  I will have to see if I can get my hands on some chicken manure for the community garden plot.

This one is the tallest one and actually has about ten small tomatoes on it already.  It is a Sungold cherry tomato.  These are my favorite cherry tomato, very sweet and juicy.  I pinched off the terminal end today to make it fill out a bit.  This one got the last cage I had left from the salvaged ones from my parents house.  It looked like it needed it the worst.  All of the tomatoes have a 4 foot bamboo stake and are tied up nice and strait to them, though.

This is the jalapeno pepper.  You can see the little corn in the corner, and the nasturtiums are getting too big already.  I may need to get those out of there, for the peppers sake.  The corn plant is a funny story.  I was planting the nasturtium seeds and there was a random corn seed in the package.  I don't have a clue what kind.  It was a little pinkish.  I just tucked it in the corner here.  It will be fun to see what is does.  I will have to hand pollinate it, though, for sure.

Here is the eggplant.  It hasn't really done anything since I planted it, but it has only been a week and a half.

The basil that I bought and planted at the same time as the eggplant, however has really gone to town.  I wish I had some tomatoes to eat with this.  I have planted about eight small pots with cinnamon basil seeds, because I am afraid this one plant will not be enough once the tomatoes come on and it may start flowering long before.

A friend of mine at work gave me some hop roots in a baggy last week and told me I could plant them in pots, so of course I had to try it.  Here are the two pots of hops with twine for them to grow up.  If this works, we are going to have the coolest balcony/porch in the apartment complex.  I put one at each end to frame the porch and I will add twine going across over the top as they grow.

Here is the other one.  You can see one of the small basil pots, too.

This is the rosemary.  You can finally tell that it has grown.

The lavender plants are growing quite a lot.

Here are the hens and chicks, cute as buttons

My husband, my daughter and I also spent the better part of the last two days helping my husbands parents plant a gigantic garden at their house.  I will try to create a plot map and have some pictures of that project at some point.  I have now become pretty busy at work lately and have not had time to keep up with posting as much as I did at first, but don't worry.  I will make sure that I at least post often enough that you can see things growing and keep up with what we are harvesting.  So far we have just harvested radishes and green onions.  It is only May 30th, though.  In our zone that is not bad.