Saturday, May 17, 2008

Peas & Progress

Just as I whined about having nothing but radishes out of our garden so far, some sugar snap peas grew while I had my back turned!!!

            P5160014

Of course, I shouldn't have been whining anyway.  I think we'll be harvesting a head of romaine every night this week.  These Little Gems are the perfect size to make salad for two.

            P5160015

I went ahead and pulled all of the ugly greens from the mesclun mix that have been eaten up by bugs and did some reseeding with Black Seeded Simpson (since the first batch is growing so quickly) and the one variety (a lettuce) in the mesclun mix that seems to be both fast growing and not quite as tasty to insects.

I need to take photos of them, or wrangle Chad into taking good photos of them, but all of the tomato plants are doing fabulously:

The old Red Robins in the hanging planters have tons of green tomatoes. Really. Chad counted like 25 on one of them!  I gave two younger plants to a friend who recently moved to a new house and hasn't been able to garden yet and I have two young ones that I hope to bring inside and keep going for winter tomatoes.

The potted Supersweet 100 is getting huge and super healthy looking!  I really need to post a photo of him...  The one in the garden looks pretty good, as well.

The Genovese is the biggest tomato plant in the garden and it has flowers!!!  I am so excited!!!  I have to admit I was a little bit skeptical when it was recommended to me at the farmer's market as an earlier producing variety (I asked someone if they had a full-sized tomato that would tide me over until my brandywines produce!), but now it looks like they'll beat everything but the much older Red Robins.

The brandywines are all looking pretty good.  The one that had no set-backs is almost climbing up into his tomato cage and the one that broke twice is finally trying to catch up to his brother.

I'm fascinated by how totally different all of the tomato plant varieties look.  Brandywines have those wide, stately potato leaves.  The Red Robins are curly and kind of ugly... in an endearing sort of way.  The Supersweets are positively overwhelming with their complicated, veiny leaves.  And the Genovese has a refined, lacy appearance.

I swear, I am completely in love with tomato plants.

2 comments:

Dr. White said...

Lovely snap peas! I need to get some new photos so I can update my site. I actually dug up a handful of new potatoes this morning and I've been steadily adding strawberries to the freezer over the last week or so! You've got me dreaming of onion braids, too!! :-D

Elizabeth said...

Thank you! We have several out there now and I'm trying to let them fill out a bit before picking, but it's so hard!

I keep going back to your blog to check for updates and was starting to feel let down! ;)