Baby Bee Garden in week 8

Well! Quite the spectacle! What you see here is about two thirds of the planned garden, gone from plan to reality! It's been 8 weeks since we planted the first pots on February 27th. Watching the plants mature has been exciting! The peas in pot 1 have begun to flower and the little white blooms are so pretty! The flowers don't last long, though, and the peas form quickly after the blossoms fall. In pot 2 the biggest broccoli plant has grown the beginnings of a crown. Let's hope the caterpillars don't get it! We have lettuce in pot 3 that looks ready to eat, and a few radishes will be ready, too. The poor, caterpillar ridden kale looks bigger lately, but it seems like half the leaves get chewed off every other day, so who knows if there will be anything left for us to eat. We're going to try planting kale again in the fall, maybe it will do better then.

Oh, pot 5... the pot we planned for dill. Unfortunately, the tree rats have destroyed about 80% of the little dill sprouts. As you can see, one dill plant seems to have taken root near the side of the pot, so we may have some dill yet. Several zucchini sprouts came up in the same spot over in pot 11, so we shifted one into the center of pot 5 to fill it in. Good luck little zucchini! The chard in pot 6 seems to be doing well, alongside the carrots that have hung in through the squirrel digging. It's nice that the caterpillars don't seem to like chard! The cilantro in pot 7 has gotten so big, it's overdue for a harvest! Next up is pot 8, with pansy plants looking good. Soon there will be pansy flowers, and we can't wait to see how they look since they came from a mixed pack.

The tomato in pot 9 has tripled in size and the parsley is filling in the rest of the room nicely. The tomatoes in pot 10 will reach the second rings of their cages soon, and we have some marigold action for a little color. Pot 11 has three good nasturtium plants that came up and the zucchini in the cage is growing quickly. Now the other trellis in this pot is for the cow peas, but they haven't sprouted for some reason. Maybe squirrels like to eat cow peas... Guess we need to plant another handful on our next planting day. We've got more marigold action in pot 13, and they have more buds ready to open soon. Pot 12 is the basil pot. The basil did well for the first few weeks, but lately we noticed the whole plants had this yellowish tint. Then, they started to look more yellow than green. After a bit of research, we came to the conclusion that they may not need so much water as we've been giving them. We're going to back off on the water and see if they look better soon.
So that's the Baby Bee Garden in week 8! `Bring on the harvest! And just in case you haven't been keeping up every week, check out this side by side comparison of week 2, week 5, week 6 and week 8! Now that's cool... (click pics to enlarge)