Vegetable Garden Week 8

Good weekend for the garden! It was beautiful and sunny and everything looked pretty good! My mom and I went to Lynch's and I picked up a bunch of herbs and some marigolds and nasturtiums to fill in the garden and give it some color. (Marigolds also keep bad bugs away from vegetable plants and even put something in the soil to keep them out down there, too.) Nasturtiums are beautiful and also very tasty in salads - a sort of mustardy, watercress flavor. Plus, both keep more bees and butterflies etc around to pollinate everything.

Doesn't it look much better already? I also gave in and bought some carrot plants at Lynch's to fill out the row that I thought wasn't growing - but there are actually a few sprouting out. I think they must just take a while. The Brussels Sprouts are super happy, as are the beets and Swiss Chard that you can see up there.

The peas are really happy.

The two different types (Wando and Sugar Snap) are slightly different, but both are growing really quickly and I'm guessing we'll have snap peas by June. Yum! Can't wait. Jamie and I each went out a few times this weekend to help train the peas. It's so fun to wrap their little tendrils around the string and see them hold on! And come out the next day and see it wrapped around like crazy. It's a little Little Shop of Horrors, but awesome.

The arugula is killing it. The rest of the lettuce is doing well too, but the arugula is really growing quickly and getting big. My two little cucumber seedlings got eaten by something, a bug I think, so I picked up a few transplants, too. I'm excited to have fresh cukes! Lots of tzatziki coming your way, Charlie Bakke! (My tzatziki-loving friend)

All the other lettuce is growing really well, too. It makes the best salad! Such a huge improvement over store bought. Just crispy, more flavorful, and each different type of lettuce tastes different so it's a great mix. I'm so happy I added lettuce to the garden!

The wall o waters were a godsend. I'm definitely going to order more for next year. Everything inside the wall o waters is thriving. Things outside are definitely doing better, but there's a major, major difference. It was a good experiment! And now I feel like the Wall o Water people should be paying me because I couldn't more strongly endorse them!

Here are my first little carrots popping up!

And a beautiful red nasturtium. I'm trying to train them to grow up the stakes I have in the corners of the first garden bed. Hope it works! They'd be so pretty.