Lettuce!

We finally have lettuce from our garden!  This is going into a nice salad!  (For comparison, the cutting board is about a foot long.)

(Sorry for the sideways picture - I can't figure out how to make it "sit" correctly.)

The full garden

Now that all threat of frost is finally gone for the season, I transplanted the tomatoes and bell peppers outside.  The garden is all put together!

From left to right we have:

Cherry tomatoes in the large black pots (11 plants).

Six yellow bell peppers in some of the colored pots.

Three "bush-type" zucchini plants in colored pots.

Three pots of wildflowers in colored pots.

The bag of lettuce.

The bag with the snow peas (that is staked).

I think the pots for the peppers and zucchini aren't big enough.  I'm going to try to find larger pots to transplant these to.  I'm all out of pots at the moment.

I'm so excited to have so many plants this year!  I can't wait for them to really be growing this summer!!

Also, here are some close-ups of the lettuce and snow peas progress:

Hopefully it won't be long until we can pick some lettuce!  I'm actually not 100% sure when it's ready to be picked.  

The peas are flowering!  This is very exciting.  :) :)

Garden tips

It occurred to me to share some tips about what has worked for me in regards to my garden.

Every year I start my tomato and/or bell pepper seeds early in the house.  This year, I planted my seeds around the beginning of March.  I didn't do anything fancy.  In fact, I used the Jiffy Greenhouse Kits that I got from my local big-box store.  You can pick a kit for tomatoes only (the pellets are larger) or there are kits for all other plants.  You can also buy pellet refills for the "all other" kits; I have yet to find the larger tomato pellets sold separately (I had to buy another complete tomato kit just for the pellets this year).  The kit comes with instructions.  It's really incredibly easy to use.  All you need is an area in your house with a decent amount of sun once the seeds sprout.

**IMPORTANT TIP** Only start the tomatoes with the larger pellets!  When I planted the first seeds this year, I didn't have any of the larger pellets for tomatoes.  Now that the seedlings are really growing, I see why they need larger pellets!

If you want to try cold-weather crops (spinach, scallions, lettuce, peas, etc.), try to grow these in the spring instead of the fall.  I have found that the spring growing season here is much longer than the fall season.  It gets SO hot here in the summer that it is really hard to tell when is the right time to plant cold-weather crops because it is hard to tell when the seasons will finally change.  And when they do change, it seems to go from very hot to pretty chilly very quickly.

This spring, I decided on a whim (and because I found myself in my local hardware store staring at the seeds) to try lettuce and snow peas.  I've been wanting to try lettuce for awhile and it's difficult to find snow peas in any form anywhere around here (even the grocery stores).  I waited to plant either of these until the 7 day forecast did not have any days going below freezing (how very scientific of me), which was the first week of March.  The temperatures did go up and down after that date, but I did some research and found that as long as the temperatures didn't go below 19 degrees Fahrenheit the plants would be fine (and they were).

I found a great free app for my phone for gardening - it's the Burpee Garden Time planner.  It lets you create a garden (or two or three) in the app and then add plants (vegetables, herbs, flowers or fruit).  Once you put in your zip code, it customizes to-do lists to let you know when the best times to plant those items are.  It's really cool!  I was browsing through the list of vegetables and started creating a "dream" garden (Zucchini?  Cool - add that!), which helped me plan the garden out better.  It's also nice to have a list with reminders of when to plant what (although I don't think this app will integrate with other calendar apps like Google Calendar).  Another nifty thing about this app is that it also has videos related to planting different vegetables and videos related to gardening in general.  Again - super awesome feature especially if you're trying to grow something new.

Garden update

Well, the lettuce doesn't look a ton different:

But the peas have grown so much I had to do something to stake them!  I watched an online video and saw that peas will climb, but I didn't realize their "feelers" would be trying to make them climb this early!  So, with nothing else to use, I re-purposed my tomato stakes into a somewhat pea-friendly vine "trellis":

Hopefully this will work ok.  I had to try to untangle some of the peas from each other because they were already latching onto each other since there was nothing else to hold onto.  I will keep an eye on them and add more of the cross-bars as needed to the stakes as the peas grow.

The peas are cold-weather plants, so they will be long gone by the time the tomatoes are tall enough to need these stakes.  Hopefully I will get a decent amount of snow peas from these plants!  (Why are snow peas so difficult to find?  I can't even find them in the frozen sections of grocery stores around here.)