Garden Progress April - June

Since it's already June and I'm just starting my journal now, I guess it'd be appropriate to give a quick update of my progress thus far. I started planting my seeds in early April, in a Jiffy tray. Here's a picture of my garden-to-be on April 10th, including a few stragglers from Summer 2009 that made it through the winter (debatably).



When the baby plants outgrew their peat pellets, I potted them up in 6 inch pots to get them through April and May. Here's a picture of a baby tomato on April 25th.



Here in Zone 5 we have pretty long winters but we can "officially" plant outside around Memorial Day. Here are some of my plants on May 30, nearly ready to go out and face the world!



I was really interested in planting a garden in a raised bed. Last year I only planted in pots, and the production was somewhat disappointing. I was so excited when we got permission from the landlord to build a raised bed. James built the whole thing over Memorial Day Weekend, and he did a great job! He constructed it from landscape timbers. The interior dimensions are 8' x 3' (24 sq. feet total).



The next thing to do was, of course, to plan my garden! I planned the garden based on the "Square Foot Gardening" method. This was the result:



Tomatoes are my favorite, so I wanted a lot of them and several different kinds. I ended up planting grape tomatoes, Yellow Pear, Rutgers (heirloom), Roma, and Early Girl tomatoes. All of them are determinate, because I was worried about the huge, vining indeterminate tomatoes in the little square foot they are given in the plot. We have a short growing season anyways, so hopefully determinate is a good way to go.

I'm growing cucumbers on a trellis in the back of the raised bed. I have 7 plants in four square feet, so I hope they're productive little guys.

I grew bell peppers (California Wonder) and Jalapeno peppers from seed, but I supplemented with two peppers from the nursery (Bell Boy and Chili Red). My hot peppers usually do great but the ones I grew from seed seemed to really struggle this year. The ones from the nursery looked much healthier.

The rest of the garden was filled in with things I wanted to try growing for the first time: green onions, a compact eggplant (Gretel), beets, carrots, lettuce, and radishes. I ran a row of dwarf marigolds down the front of the bed. Here's the raised bed garden on June 13, about a week after everything was planted:



In the past week or so, some of the plants have really taken off. Here's a picture from June 19.



Some of the radishes look nearly big enough to eat after just 17 days.



My Early Girl is flowering:



and there are even signs of life on last year's pepper plant!



The plants that didn't make the cut for the raised bed are parked on the front steps. Most of them seem pretty content thus far, although I did have a few casualties (a tomatillo and a pepper) from potting them up. Here are a few herbs growing happily on the steps: