Bolting... harvest... dinner!

What happened to spring? Blink and you'll miss it, down here in zone 8a. The last few weeks have brought temperatures in the upper 80s, so it looks like spring is over!

About two weeks ago, we came out to inspect the garden and we saw something growing from the spinach that looked a little odd. We looked closely and realized that what we were seeing was a cluster of flowers... our spinach had bolted! When the temperature rises, plants grown for foliage start to make flower buds, and gardeners call this process bolting. Bolting is bad news. When you're growing a plant for the purpose of eating its leaves, you want the plant to grow as many tasty leaves as possible.

However, when the plant begins to make flowers, it shifts its energy away from growing nice leaves toward growing flowers and seeds for reproduction. At this point, some leafy greens like spinach and lettuce begin to lose their sweetness and become bitter. So, we knew it was time to harvest the spinach... oh well, it looked delicious! We decided to use the spinach, along with green garlic, basil and parsley from the garden, to make a hot pasta salad tossed with tortellini, tomatoes and olive oil. Our first meal from the garden was beautiful, healthy, delicious... and SATISFYING!

A few days later, we discovered that one of our lettuces had sent up a little cluster of flower buds in the middle... uh oh, bolting! Some of our peas had reached four and five inches long by this point and some of our radishes looked good enough to eat. It was high time for another harvest! We picked all those, plus a big double handful of cilantro. We don't know what kind of lettuce this was... it came from a mesclun seed mix and had a sweet, pungent flavor. We made a bed of this lettuce, added the radishes and sugar pod peas, and topped that with a dressing we made with the cilantro, lemon juice, garlic and oil. It all came together for a very interesting side salad.

The most recent plant to show signs of bolting was our biggest broccoli. We noticed that the floret cluster had begun to spread out a bit, it looked a bit looser when it had been densely packed. It was starting to show a hint of yellow color in some spots, and some of the individual buds looked big... these are all signs that the bud is about to flower, at which point it would be ruined for eating. The total diameter of the broccoli crown was about 3 inches, but we were forced to harvest it... We ate it raw on the spot! (click pics to enlarge)

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)

New pots in the garden!

Transplants in the terrarium

With our cool season veggies well established, the time for planting our warm season veggies had arrived! Warm season veggies are those that cannot live through a frost, like tomatoes, peppers, and squashes. We learned that here, in hardiness zone 8a, our latest probability of frost is around the middle of April. Our winter was very mild and spring arrived early, so we thought it might be safe to transplant some tomatoes in early April. We set April 1st as our goal date for adding pots for tomatoes, zucchini, cow peas, basil, catnip, nasturtiums and marigolds. Just like the rest, we're growing them all from seed. The tomatoes, basil, catnip and marigolds should be started early indoors, so we started those seeds in early February, about 8 weeks ahead of our planting date. We planned to sow the rest of the seeds directly into our garden pots.

Pot 10

Well planting day finally arrived, the transplants were ready as planned, and pots 10-15 went out into the front yard! Pot 10 had been planned for tomatoes, marigolds and basil, but the basil got cut at the last minute in favor of having more space for the tomatoes. Besides, we had reserved a pot especially for basil, pot 12. Pot 11 was for zucchini, cow peas and nasturtiums. We anchored trellises for the zucchini and peas and planted the seeds directly under them. We're hoping the nasturtiums will trail over the edge of the pot. Pot 13 was planted with only marigolds. Pot 14 became home for the catnip transplants.

Top right: pot 15, middle right: pot 14
 and random flower pots

We had a 15th pot planned for more dill, however pot 5 had already been devoted to dill and it has performed very poorly, so we decided not to plant any more just yet. Instead, we picked up a couple of strawberry transplants at the nursery and planted those in pot 15. Hopefully one day we will be eating fresh berries from this random addition! We also added three other pots at random, one planted with zinnia seeds, one with morning glories, and the last one planted with "flower balls" that a little hippie girl gave me, which are flower seeds rolled into a ball of clay. It'll be nice to have a few extra flowers around! With the seeds sown and transplants in place, it's time to sit back and let Mother Nature do her thing for a while...
stay tuned... (Click pics to enlarge)

Side view of the expanded garden. It's reached about two thirds of its total size.

Another month later...

Fast forward another month and... Wow! It's starting to look like a real garden!

 In pot 1 the sugar pod peas are climbing the trellis nicely. In front of that is the spinach, and look how big it's grown! Is it ready to eat yet???

Pot 2

Pot 1

The broccoli plants in pot 2 are HUGE and they look delicious! We'll be really happy if we get to eat homegrown broccoli florets next month, because these guys are quite popular with the caterpillars... Whenever there's time, we check the broccoli leaves to seek and destroy all caterpillars and eggs. We filled in pot 2 with spring onions, beets and green garlic hoping they would help fend off broccoli pests with their strong odors, but can't tell if it's made any difference. Several fellow gardeners have told us horror stories of broccoli failing to grow florets or getting eaten up by pests, but it looks like we'll have a mess of broccoli leaves to eat, if nothing else!

Pot 6

To the right of the broccoli is pot 6, home to the Swiss chard, nestled with carrots all around. See the tiny carrot tops? Tree rats, er... squirrels keep digging in the carrots, so they're not doing too well. Pot 5, down in front of the broccoli, has a few dill sprouts, but they've taken a beating from the squirrels, too. We've learned that even though we live in town, our garden can still be vulnerable to critters! Between the tree rats and the caterpillars, it's practically a battle zone!

Pot 4

Pot 4, front and center, has seen the worst of it. One of the kale plants died after a caterpillar ate all its leaves, but then we had a spinach seed come up in an awkward place over in pot 1, so we just moved it over into pot 4 to replace the dead kale. It wasn't even a whole day later when we came home and found the new spinach had been dug up by the tree rats! Bastards! Oh well... we will soon have another kale seedling ready to take its place. Pot 3 is a low bowl of mesclun lettuce and radishes. We had to thin out some of the plants after the seeds came up too close together, but hopefully everything has enough room to grow for a while now.

Pot 3

Over on the left side of the garden, you'll notice we added three more pots! Pot 8, on the end, has 5 little pansy plants. Next is pot 7, just for cilantro. Pot 9 we had planned for parsley alone, then it got a tomato plant added at the last minute. See, what had happened was... so we got this topsy-turvy tomato planter, you know the "as seen on TV" type... anyway, it's really hard to get a tomato in there without breaking it, so when we thought we had tortured this poor tomato seedling enough we ended up just sticking it in pot 9 and planting the parsley around it. The pot might be little small for a tomato, but we just had to wing it with that one! Gardening is a good exercise in adaptability in addition to patience. Well, that's the Baby Bee Garden about 6 weeks into our growing season here in zone 8A! This is approximately one third of whole garden, according to our garden plan! It won't be long now til we're eating fresh spring mix salads with radishes and sugar pod peas... mmm... (Click pics to enlarge)

Two weeks later..

We put our first transplants and seeds outdoors in the very early spring and here's what they looked like after a couple weeks. The peas in pot 1 came up within days, and started toward the trellis. You can barely see the spinach plant there in front. The pansies around the edges have survived the squirrel digging assaults. Those tree rats have been digging around all the pots every morning! Over in pot 2 the broccoli has grown bigger. There's not much to say about the kale in pot 4, it's still about the same size. Pot 5 was sown with dill seed and pot 6 with carrot seeds that haven't had time to sprout. Pot 3 is up on the porch, a bowl of mesclun lettuce and radishes which have just sprouted. The Baby Bee Garden is off to a lovely start, stay tuned for new additions coming soon... (Click pics to enlarge)

Pot 1

Pots 2 and 4

Pot 3

Seedings to transplants, and the first few pots!

It generally takes 6 or 8 weeks for a seed to grow into a plant big enough to transplant into the garden. We started our cool season vegetables in mid-January, aiming to transplant them in late February. On February 4th we started another round of seeds, including tomatoes, kale, marigolds, and basil with a goal planting date of April 3rd. Within a few weeks, we had so many little seedlings we ran out of space in the terrarium!

The terrarium sits in our south-facing window, so the seedlings get lots of light on sunny days. We nursed all the little guys until it was time to put out the first few pots near the end of February. About a week ahead of our first goal planting date, we began to set our broccoli, spinach and pansy seedlings outside for a few hours a day, to help them get used to the cruel outdoors after living inside their cozy terrarium for so long. We had planned for February 27th to be our planting day for pots 1 and 2 (see previous post for the garden plan) and that turned out just perfectly. All our seedlings had four or six leaves, they looked a little smaller than the size of the seedlings we have seen at nurseries, but we figured they'd be happier with plenty of room to grow in the big pots. If we had learned anything from our seedlings over that six week period, it was that plants WANT to live! They want to live way more than they want to die! Especially the pansies... they're tough!

We only had one spinach seedling to transplant, it went into the middle of pot 1 along with several pansy transplants around the outer edge. At the back of the first pot we anchored a pretty trellis and planted our sugar pod pea seeds, which we had soaked in water overnight to soften them. Three broccoli transplants went into pot 2. A few days later, we added pots 3, 4 and 5. Pot 3 is a large shallow bowl-shaped planter into which we sowed our mesclun lettuce mix (in the back of the picture on the steps). Pot 4 was planted with three red russian kale seedling. We sowed seeds for dill into pot 5. So, by March 3rd our container garden was up to 5 pots. We're off to a good start and it looks so cute! All that's left to do is water and wait...