I'm thinking omelette

The pepper from my aero garden has finally ripened.  There are two more on the plant now, but I'm not sure I have the patience to wait the month or so for them to turn red, since the tomatoes have stopped producing.  I'm going to get some salad greens to grow in there.  Probably romaine, since they don't offer spinach.  That will go a long way toward my salad a day goal.

"Cottage" garden (mostly) planted

After a week and a half of hard work, tearing up grass and breaking roots and clay, I finally got some seeds in the ground in our side yard yesterday.  In the middle two beds, I planted calendula, poppy, cosmos, nigella, larkspur and bachelor's buttons.  In the first of them, I alternated the seeds in the approximate spacing they should be in after thinning.  In the second one, I scattered the remaining seeds and then stirred the dirt.  I'm interested to see which way works the best. 

I'm planning on planting hollyhock along the road (on the near side of the path as well).  Since it's biennial and probably won't bloom much this year anyway I'm putting that off until after I get my okra and squash going in the other garden.  I haven't planted anything in the bed closest to the house, either.  I'm thinking about cilantro, dill, parsley, chamomile and marigold.  I'm also going to be putting tomatoes out into any empty spaces later in the year.  Along both sides of the path I'm planning on the chia sage and cayenne pepper.

Tomatoes planted

Over the weekend, I got my tomato seedlings in the ground!  There are twenty in this picture and four more around the garden.  I broke down and bought bamboo stakes for them, remembering how hard it is to cut bamboo.  Since I plan on taking the side-shoots as clones, rooting them and planting them out in the garden, I'll still need more stakes and will likely have a chance to cut some bamboo this year.  The lavender in the foreground is starting to bud.

Peak rosemary bloom?

I'm not sure if this is actually the peak of the flowers on my rosemary, but I went ahead and took a picture just in case.  You can see that a half-dozen or so of the boughs have flowers on them.  There are still a couple with unopened buds, too.  I'm hoping that it will still be blooming when the four salvias that surround it bloom.  They all have buds that are just starting to open, so it should look pretty good in a week or two.  Last year, this rosemary plant bloomed for the first time, but only had two flowers total.

I've been ill and we've had bad weather, both of which have prevented me from gardening.  I finally got back out there this week, though.  I broke ground on my "cottage garden," which I should have done weeks ago.  It's been slow going, but I hope to get that planted this week.  I also spent a few hours weeding my established garden area.  My dill volunteers have started to sprout and the kitchen sage has re-seeded.  I also got cilantro, dill and bok choy planted.  I'm hoping to put my tomato seedlings out this weekend as well.

Mustard fruit

If you've been reading this blog, you know I've been concerned about collecting the seeds from my mustard greens and bok choy plants.  I had assumed that they would develop within the flowers somehow.  At one point, I even thought I saw them, but it turned out to be some bugs enjoying the flowers.  This week, I was pleased to notice green-bean-looking fruit following the flowers on the stalk.  I'm assuming that they're seed pods and will have the tiny seeds inside.

The main reason I want to collect these seeds is to replant them this fall.  I'm also a little curious about making mustard.

Hardening off

I used the power outage this week as an excuse to begin hardening off my tomatoes.

Seedlings and seeds

The seedlings in the closet are coming along great!  The tomatoes are huge and I'll probably start hardening them off soon.  All but one of the peppers have sprouted and I've thinned them to one in each cup, like I did with the tomatoes.  I've also thinned most of the chia.  The chamomile is coming up, but it's so small!  I probably should have started it sooner.

The plants in the egg cartons are not doing nearly so well.  I don't think I'll be using the egg cartons for planting again.  There's not a lot of room for dirt and roots in each section and the material itself is drawing water out of the soil, making it necessary for me to water more.  Most of the new type of marigold came up, but I only have one left.  Five parsley sprouted, but only two remain.  The cumin didn't come up at all, but I wasn't entirely expecting them to, since I didn't buy seeds from a seed company, but just planted some from the kitchen.  They were probably treated in some way to keep them from sprouting.  The other thing that didn't come up at all was the marigold seed I saved from my garden last year.  The plant I took them from was a volunteer.  I'm thinking that it might have needed a second plant nearby in order to produce viable seed.  It looks like I might have to buy some marigold plants at the nursery.  There is already parsley in my garden that survived the winter.  Hopefully, it will go to seed this year and I'll have some volunteers next year.

My new seed order came in today!  In addition to my primary herb and nightshade garden out back, I was going to grow a lot of vegetables in the front yard and have a cottage garden on the side of the house.  Judging by how little time I've had so far to work outside this year, I decided that was a little ambitious.  I'm going to do slightly less veggies and fit them into my current garden space, leaving the front yard intact.  I am still going to pursue the cottage garden idea, though, and those were the seeds that arrived today.  I got hollyhock, poppy, larkspur, cosmos, bachelor buttons, calendula, nigella, amaranth and sunflower.  All of these flowers are self-seeding and all but the poppy are good cut flowers.  Most of them are also good for attracting beneficial insects.  I'm going to plant these along the side of the house and I'm going to mix in some herbs, like parsley, cilantro and dill.  I'm also going use this area for the cayenne peppers I was planning on putting in the front yard, and any tomatoes that don't fit in the back.