Garden update

 Hi friends.  It's time for a garden update.

Last time I talked about the garden, I had just planted cabbage, radishes, and beets outside in pots.  

I have about 12 cabbage plants spread between three pots.  I've been thinning them as they grow, and will end up with one, or at most two, cabbages per pot.  Or, I should say, one, or at most two, cabbage plants per pot.  Who knows if they will actually form heads?  Seems kind of impossible, to be honest.

Both my homegrown radish seeds and the store-bought seeds from a few seasons ago had a good germination rate, and we harvested and ate some the other day.  I reseeded in the empty spots left by the harvested radishes, and will continue to do so as I harvest them, so hopefully we'll have radishes throughout the summer.  Also hopefully, they won't go to seed this year.

We have beets!  One of the weird things about planting beets is that the seeds are actually a cluster of 2-5 seeds inside of a dried fruit.  So when they come up, they come up as multiples which need to be thinned so the roots will have the space necessary to develop.  About half of my beets germinated, so I resowed in the empty spots about a week ago, and a few are already up.

I've got high hopes for the melons this year.  I've got three Sakata's Sweet Melon (pictured above) and seven  Otome Watermelon (pictured below) that I started indoors and transplanted outside a couple of weeks ago.  They have plenty of space, and a trellis to climb, plus they don't take as long to ripen as other melons and watermelons, so maybe, just maybe, this will be the year I successfully grow a watermelon.  Those seven were the last of my watermelon seeds, so if I want to attempt watermelon again after this year, I'll have to purchase starts from the nursery, or buy more seed.  

Or harvest seed from these watermelons.  Keep your fingers crossed!

No, don't keep your fingers crossed, because you might need to do something with those fingers at some point in the next couple of months.  But do cross them in spirit: in solidarity with my watermelon growing dreams.

I planted sunflowers, zinnias (seed I saved from last year), and marigolds (the last of the commercial seed from several years ago, plus some I saved from last year) in the middle garden bed about a week ago.  These might be zinnias.  They're in the spot where I put the zinnia seeds, and they look sorta like zinnia seedlings.  I am really looking forward to a bed full of beautiful flowers.  I also transplanted a cherry tomato from the nursery into one corner of this bed.  

Fewer than half of my sugar daddy snap peas came up, but those that did are looking good.  I have heard that squirrels, or maybe other small rodent-type creatures, will watch where the humans plant peas and then dig them up later to eat.  I did not see any evidence of this, but perhaps the small rodents are clever and covered their tracks.  Small rodents digging up my seeds would certainly account for the poor germination rate we seem to always experience with peas.

I replanted in the blank spots earlier this week.  It'll be nice to have peas ripening in succession rather than all at once, because we love (and I do mean love) sugar snap peas, but even we have our limits, and I don't think we would like them as much preserved.

I decided not to plant potatoes this year, but I think I probably will next year, especially if I can get my hands on a red, white, and blue seed potato mix.  I think red, white, and blue potatoes would be so much fun.

I deployed the butterfly bombs in front of (or behind, depending on your perspective) the chicken coop.  So far, they're still looking like lumps of clay, although there might be seedlings emerging from one of them.  The seeds in the bombs are perennials or self-seeding annuals, so my hope is that the plants will decorate the front (or back) of the coop for years to come, providing food for pollinators and beauty for my eyes.

And that's it.  What's growing in your garden?