Rural Garden: General Growth

Monster tomato plants aside, the rest of the rural garden is also showing some excellent growth.

The Left Garden

Finally a pea harvest!

Lots of buds on my Tam Jalapenos.

Unfortunately my largest broccoli plant now looks like swiss cheese.

I'm pretty happy with all of the good growth, minus the destruction of my broccoli. My squash (butternut, summer and spaghetti), zucchini, pumpkin and cucumber seeds have all sprouted as well. However, next time I will be planting the peas a lot thicker than I did this time.

Seedling Update

I'm sure everyone's getting sick of seedling pictures, but I'm proud of my babies and I need to show them off! This is really the first time I'm doing any major seed starting. Last year I started a hybrid tomato and broccoli, but that's it. I direct seeded beans and squash successfully, but all of my other plants were freebies that were donated by the local YouthGrow program to all of the community gardens. It's a great organization that gets teens involved with growing their own food. They start plants for the community gardens and plants to go into the large YouthGrow gardens that they help to maintain all summer. While I love free plants, this year my goal was to start all of my plants from seed.

Kellogg's Breakfast shared by EG and Oregon Spring

Black Cherry also from EG

Brandywine and Cherokee Purple from EG

Oxheart Pink and Polish Linguisa

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper that was a freebie with the Tam Jalapenos I got from eBay

Tam Jalapenos and Organic Black Beauty Eggplant (With some cauliflower mixed in... I accidentally seeded the cauliflower in the wrong 6-pack)

Early Snowball Cauliflower from EG

Broccoli Waltham 29 and Organic Broccoli Deccicio

As you can easily see, EG (from Our Engineered Garden) was extremely generous and gave me lots of seeds to help me out this year. I'm a broke college student and I just can't afford tons and tons of seed unfortunately. However, I'll be saving as much seed as I can this year to start building up my own little seed library. Hopefully I'll have a bunch of fun stuff to trade this winter!

Some of these guys are starting to get their first set of true leaves, which means I'll soon be potting up! The cauliflower and broccoli will be first, as well as trying to rescue the cauliflower from the eggplant. We'll see how the extraction goes...

Seeding and Seedlings

Welcome, and thanks for following my blog DeanO and Cassandra!

Well, I finally got around to seeding my spring veggies. (Most of them anyways...) I planted 12 cells of Little Gem Lettuce, 12 cells of Fordhook Swiss Chard, 6 cells of Organic Broccoli Decccio and 6 cells of Broccoli Waltham 29. I still need to start my cauliflower and spinach and get going on the summer veggies. I have to pick up a few more seed starting trays from my mothers house this weekend and then everything will be set!

My Walla Walla onions seedlings are doing well! I separated them out of the little bunches that popped up here and there. The only frustrating thing is waiting for my Red Burgandy onions to start coming up... Especially since they got sent late as a replacement for my backordered Southport Red Globe onions. We'll see how they do with the shortened season.

Before separation, this is the seedlings.

Now they have room to grow and even got a haircut!

My Orange Sun bell pepper plant from last year is showing new life.

And I know spring is on its way when my chives start coming back... Can't wait for warmer weather!