Baby veggies!

Hello everyone! VERY exciting news this time... my first bell pepper and eggplant have appeared! I took a bunch of pictures yesterday morning, but I was in a rush to get somewhere so they are blurry. But even so I thought it would be worth posting them because you get the idea of what they look like.

Baby bell pepper!

Baby eggplant (bottom left of picture)
I saw another little flower on the same plant that has the baby eggplant, so hopefully that means we'll have another little veggie growing soon!

Eggplant plants + mystery plant

The eggplant plants + mystery plant are growing quickly! Here is what the eggplant plants looked like last weekend.

Bell pepper plants

The bell pepper plants are continuing to grow quickly as well. Here they are this week, and here's what they looked like last weekend.

SUNFLOWERS!

New sunflowers this week! It's hard to believe how long it took just to get the first one, and now new ones bloom almost every day!

New red sunflower (be sure to click on this picture so you can see how pretty the petal colors are up close)

Orange-y yellow sunflowers

Big sunflower plant
This is the first sunflower plant that bloomed, and it's also the biggest plant. It seems to be making new flowers every day! This is what the same plant looked like three weeks ago.

Picture of the garden from the top of the stairs...

Here is the same view but this picture was taken last week.

That's all for this week. Thanks for checking out What's Blooming in Bloomingdale :)

Sarah's Law

Greetings, garden lovers! This summer is flying by, and I can't believe it's almost August! We have had an extremely hot summer, with 38 days over 90F, including two in April. This has been admittedly pretty miserable for humans (and our wallets/air conditioning bills!), but it's helping the plants grow like crazy.

It is literally astonishing to watch these plants grow so quickly. I water my garden every day when I get home from work, and it's really fun to see how everything is progressing. Every day there is something new: a new sunflower, new buds on the sunflower plants, flowers on the bean plants, new leaves on the okra plants - everything is always changing. It's lovely to watch. I titled this blog post "Sarah's Law," in the vein of Moore's Law, which is basically the idea that things grow exponentially. Sarah's Law is that my plants seem double or triple in size in between every blog post!

I also marvel at how much work the garden was in the beginning, and now I can just sit back, water it, and watch everything grow. All I do is weed periodically, but that's really it.

My last blog post was a retrospective glance at how much the plants had grown, and since everything has grown so much since last time, I'm going to do the same thing with a few pictures I took today. Don't forget that you can click on all of the pictures below to see the full-size version.


First red sunflower!

This is the first red sunflower to appear in the garden! I'm glad I got a picture of it because it only lasted a few days. I think the extreme heat is hard on the flowers. The good news is that there are new flower buds all over the place! Here are some pics:

Budding sunflower

Another sunflower bud

Sunflower bud on my biggest sunflower plant

Volunteer tomato = shade fail

This is my volunteer tomato, and as you can see it's growing almost completely in the shade. When I originally mapped out my garden, I decided to plant the flowers in front to dissuade passers-by from picking my vegetables. It seems obvious now, but at the time I did not consider how large the flowers would get, and how they would block the sun for my other plants! Oops. I think the tomato will be fine, it may just not grow as big as the other ones.

Seed tomato

This is the tomato I grew from seed. It's funny how it took forever and ever for it to get started and transform from the sprout to seedling phase, but it's growing like a real plant now! Here is a picture from two weeks ago.

Speaking of pictures from two weeks ago... do you see the little tomato plant in the orange pot on the right side of that same picture? I didn't realize how much it grew, but here's what it looks like now!

Another tomato seedling

I think this little guy is ready to go into the ground, but I'm going to wait until it has cooled off from 800 million bazillion degrees to just a million degrees before I do it.

Another big winner in terms of growth are my okra plants. This is what they looked like two weeks ago, and here is what they look like today:

Okra... not seedlings anymore!

Of all the plants' growth, I think the okra's is the most impressive!

This is what the eggplants + mystery volunteer plant looked like last time, and here is what they look like today:

Eggplants + mystery plant

And another picture of one of the individual plants, just for posterity:

Eggplant

I think the peppers have doubled or tripled in size. Here is what they looked like two weeks ago, and this picture is from today:

Bell peppers

Even my littlest pepper plant now has flowers on it! (Unfortunately none of the pepper flowers are setting and becoming peppers because it has been too hot... but it's still fun to watch the plants grow!)

Littlest original pepper plant, with flowers

I am not a naturally clumsy person, but it's hard to maneuver around in the garden while watering everything and not step on anything. I stepped on a pepper plant a few weeks ago, and all that was left was one tiny little leaf poking out at the base of the plant. I am very happy to report that even my oafish clumsiness couldn't stop the little plant from growing back!

The little pepper plant that could

In other pepper-related news, I planted many, many bell pepper and hot pepper seeds and had a ton of little sprouts. However when things got busy at work I neglected them and almost every single one died. There were two little sprouts, each with two little leaves, that stubbornly held on, or at least appeared to not die, even though they turned a sickly shade of yellowish green and completely stopped growing. I have been watering them for almost a month with no sign of growth, and then all of a sudden they both made a comeback! They have been sprouting new little leaves almost every other day. I am thrilled! Here they are:

Hot or bell pepper seedlings... from seed!

I have no idea if these are bell or hot pepper seeds... but here's to hoping they continue to grow and get big enough for us to find out!

The same story applies to my little cucumber plant (below). This is the only remaining cucumber of the whole seed packet I planted (if you remember, I planted a bunch of cucumbers in the ground where the okra is now, but they didn't survive a few unexpectedly cold weeks after I planted them). I'm going to plant this guy in the ground when I put in the other little tomato.

Mini cucumber plant

This plant is supposed to be a "container" plant, meaning you can grow it in a container rather than an actual yard. I am contemplating actually growing it as a container plant on my front steps/porch so it doesn't crowd out the eggplant that's in the ground. More to come on that once I make a decision...

I think my favorite plants to watch growing are the beans. They climbed up the fence like crazy, and keep sending their little bean tendrils out in every direction, trying to climb further. I think they would keep climbing up indefinitely if given the proper support (maybe next year I will build them a trellis like this one). Anyway the beans have been putting all of their energy into growing huge beautiful leaves and climbing everywhere. I think it's funny that they all grew up and up, and now that it's crowded at the top of the fence, no one wants to climb back down and use that available space. One of them even tried to climb up a nearby sunflower instead of climbing down the fence! Anyway, here's a picture:

Beans climbing along the fence

They have grown a lot in a month! This is what they looked like on June 28th.

In the past couple of days, little white flowers started appearing! (Below is my favorite picture this week). I'm wondering if, like the peppers, the bean flowers won't set and I'll have to wait before I get some real beans.

Bean flowers

And finally... it's time for a look at the garden then and now. Here is what it looked like the first day I put seedlings in the ground, back on April 10th, and this is what it looks like now:

My garden/front yard

And this is what it looks like from the sidewalk in front of the house:

View of the garden from the sidewalk in front of the house

You can see that the sunflower I was so proud of in my last blog post now has four or five flowers (though none have been as big or lovely as the first one). It is also 79" tall (about 6 1/2 feet)... so it's not growing quite as quickly (six inches in the past two weeks) but I suspect that's because the plant's energy is going towards producing the flowers. That's fine by me! :)

That's all for this week! Thanks for checking out what's Blooming in Bloomingdale!

Hello sunshine!

This week may have been the most exciting one in the brief history of this garden... the past two weeks have been hot hot hot, but last week it was 95-100F almost every day, plus humidity. This weather is bad news for people, but the plants love it. They are going "gangbusters" as my aunt says, which means they are growing like crazy. I thought it would be fun to take a mid-summer walk down memory lane, so you can all see how much everything has grown...

The plant that has been the most fun to watch is my first sunflower, which has been growing faster than any other plant in my garden:

My first sunflower!


It's been growing so ridiculously fast that I decided to measure its progress:

Saturday July 3rd: 59 inches tall
Tuesday July 6th: 63"
Wednesday July 7th: 66.5"
Sunday July 10th: 73"

So as you can see, it grew about 14 inches in ONE WEEK! It's hard to believe that this is what it looked like on June 13th... not even a month ago! It has more than doubled in size! And this is what it looked like on May 3rd... a little over two months ago!

Anyway the first flower bloomed, and like a proud mama I posted a picture immediately on Facebook... I know it's dorky but I am really excited about it! Almost every time I'm out in the garden and anyone walks by, they say "nice sunflower!" I love that others are enjoying the garden too.

The other thing that's neat about this sunflower is that it's really just starting to bloom. It has at least five or six other little flower buds, and more pop up every day. Check out all the little leaves blooming everywhere along the stalk:




California poppies

I planted a bunch of California poppy seeds and they all sprouted and are growing - but no flowers yet. I'm wondering if this is a type of plant that flowers the second year? In theory they're supposed to bloom this year, but I think the seed packets always tell you what you want to hear, whether or not it's true :P


Volunteer plant.... getting big now!

Remember all of those little volunteer sprouts that came up? Well the one I decided to let grow is growing quickly in the heat. It looks exactly like the eggplants I planted, but an old friend who is a prolific gardener (hi Genevieve!) said that eggplants, melon, and cucumbers all look exactly alike while they're growing. The only thing is, I don't remember composting any eggplants... so who knows what will come up. It's kind of fun watching it grow and waiting to see what happens!


Eggplant plants

They haven't grown that much, but they're really taking off in the heat. You can see what they looked like when I planted them here.


Bell pepper plants

I have noticed that the bell peppers have grown, but didn't realize how much until I looked at the picture from when I first planted them. WOW! I am hoping for lots and lots of peppers. There have been a lot of white flowers on one of the plants, but so far no little peppers. I was wondering what might be wrong, but after some research (thanks Google!) I learned that apparently if it's above 90 degrees the peppers won't "set" and the flowers just die. Sad! It's supposed to be in the high 80s this week, so maybe it will be cool enough to get some little peppers growing.


Basil plants

The basil has grown the most out of all the herbs I planted. We are going to have so much basil we won't know what to do with it! I'm not used to cooking with fresh herbs, and to be honest I feel kind of guilty cutting pieces off the plants... but I mean hellooooo that's what I planted them for! This is what the basil looked like when I first planted it (it's the plant on the far right).


Cosmo flowers

I planted a bunch of Cosmo flower seeds in between the sunflower plants, mostly just to see if I could grow them outside, and because I figured the sunflowers could share the dirt. To my surprise they have sprouted and they're really growing!


The tomato I grew from seed

I just put this little guy in the ground today... look at how little it was back on June 13th!


Okra

These are the okra seedlings I planted two weeks ago. They also seem to love the heat, and they are growing a new pair of leaves every couple of days, each twice the size of the last. I'm hoping for a ton of okra. I think it might be my favorite vegetable! I didn't grow up eating it, which probably adds to its appeal because it's still a novel vegetable for me. But it's also fun to eat because it's such a weird shape, and it's covered in little prickly hairs that you have to really scrub off. So it's sort of like, "are you serious? are you really trying to eat this crazy vegetable?" But it's delicious. I highly recommend trying it if you haven't already.

Okay that's about all for this week... thanks for checking out what's blooming in Bloomingdale! :)

Pests and critters invade...

Greetings, friends! Well, it's almost July and the garden is coming along, if not entirely as expected. It is interesting to see what I have been able to grow and what hasn't done so well. It's hard not to feel a little twinge of failure when I see all of the seed packets for things I wanted to grow but didn't work - Swiss chard, for example. But on the other hand, it has been fun to see things that are growing well, and to come along some very unexpected surprises along the way (volunteer plants, which I wrote about last time).

Speaking of unexpected surprises, some kind of critter, or rather, a roving gang of many types of critters, is devouring my plants. Something (a cat? a horde of cats?) ate the ENTIRE catnip plant in about two days (it was a huge plant - 1/100 of the plant would have gotten my cat Bailey cracked out for days, so I'm guessing it was some other critter or I would have drugged-up cats rolling around in the front yard). Something ate most of the leaves on my eggplant plants, an entire tomato seedling (sadface!), and three of my bell pepper plants. I don't think it's a bug pest because the entire plant is getting eaten. Anyone have any guesses about what it could be? The geek in me wants to set up a night-vision webcam to catch whatever it is in action!


Bell pepper buds/flowers

The bell pepper plants that survived the critter night-eating are growing bigger, and one of them has these little buds that are getting ready to bloom into flowers - and then grow into little peppers! VERY exciting!



Sunflower!

My big sunflower also has a little flower bud- which means that a real sunflower is imminent! The sunflower plant is now officially taller than the fence (will post a picture next time). I swear it has been growing at least an inch a day! I love flowers more than anything and I can't wait to come home and see a sunflower that I grew blooming in my garden!



What MITE be eating my plants?

A couple of my plants had been slowly yellowing, and I assumed it was somehow related to the soil quality or excessive watering. But the plants became more and more yellow, and not all of them seemed to be affected (for example, the bell pepper plants are very healthy and not yellow at all). I did some research and it turns out that spider mites are to blame! They are microscopic little critters in the arachnoid family, and they're apparently very common and very hard to get rid of. They puncture the cells in your plant and suck out the liquid. You can either pesticide-bomb your garden (not an option) or spray each individual leaf with water to wash the mites off. I'm doing that (when I remember, and so far it might be helping) - but in the meantime I removed a couple of bean plants that were severely infested. My roommate suggested spraying the plants with garlic-infused water as a mite deterrent. Anyone else have any suggestions?



My first bean!
I started this gardening project back in March when it was still in the 40s at night... and last week I picked my first bean! It is green with a few little purple streaks here and there.

Beans are really easy to grow, and they grow really fast. Here is a picture of the beans I planted three weeks ago - they're already huge and climbing up the fence!





Okra seedlings

In other news - I didn't have much luck growing most of my veggies from seed, but one of the seeds that did seem to sprout pretty readily and grow quickly is okra. These are some okra seedlings I planted in the ground today - we'll see how they do! It might be too late to plant seedlings and have them grow into real plants, but who knows. It's worth a shot! And I absolutely loooooove okra (it's such a fun vegetable, both to look at and to eat!)


Stevia plant

Have you heard of stevia? I had heard of it but thought it was some sort of newfangled (yes, I just said 'newfangled') artificial sweetener. Well as it turns out, it's a type of plant! I saw this little herb at a local nursery the other day and it's a stevia plant. I decided that it would be a worthy science experiment for $3 to buy it and try to help it grow and see what happened. I tasted one of the leaves, and darn if it didn't taste incredibly sweet and just like sugar! I'm going to try and brew some iced tea with the leaves once the plant gets settled (I put it in a pot with some dirt next to my other herbs).


That's all for this post... thanks for checking out what is Blooming in Bloomingdale! :)

Back like WHOA

and.... I'm back! It has been a crazy couple of weeks/months and I have neglected my garden. But things have calmed down a bit so I was able to get in the dirt and get some things done this weekend!

First things first... it is a lot harder to grow things from seed than I thought! A lot of my seeds sprouted but didn't do a whole lot after that. Some things eventually became little plants (my beans and peas for example) but other things (all of the herb seeds, cabbage, chard, and beet seeds) never got past the sprout stage. I stopped watering things at some point and I'm sure that didn't help. Anyway, I threw in the towel and decided to buy actual plants this weekend.

NEW PLANTS

Red, orange, yellow and green bell pepper plants (who's coming over for fajitas later this summer? :)

Herbs (left to right: English thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary, dill (growing from seed), and basil - all in the random selection of pots I found around the house

Eggplants! I love eggplant but have not had much luck cooking it well (anyone have eggplant-cooking tips?)


NOT NEW PLANTS

Pole beans

There were a few little purple flowers and there are some teeny tiny beans growing on the plants now... very exciting! I planted some more beans along the fence (where the peas used to be) so hopefully those will sprout and start climbing. Peas love cold weather and I started them too late (apparently you're supposed to start them in February) - but I did get a few little peas (and they were delicious). Here's a picture of one:

Pea plant... with pea!

And finally... my sunflower plants did the best out of everything, because in spite of not being watered they grew like WHOA. The biggest one is over two feet tall already! (The seed packet says they can grow up to six feet tall)



Sunflowers I can't wait to see what colors the flowers will be (they come in all variations of red, yellow and orange)


VOLUNTEER PLANTS: update

One of the most interesting things about this gardening experience so far is the unexpected role my compost has played in what grows in the garden. Several things I did not intentionally plant have grown from vegetable/fruit that was in my compost. My volunteer plants include melons/cucumbers, tomatoes and potatoes. In my last blog post, the top photo is of some seedlings that came up, which I thought were honeydew melon (they looked exactly like melon seedlings... check out this photo from a seed company to see a picture that I thought confirmed my judgment of what type of seeds they were). I weeded those seedlings out because melon plants are huge and sprawl and I have limited space. Anyway, I was at Home Depot yesterday and I saw these seedlings:

Cucumber plants

The cucumber seedlings look exactly like the volunteer plants in my garden. So now I'm wondering if they were actually honeydew melon or if they were cucumbers! I decided to let one grow to find out (why not).

The other surprise I found in the garden yesterday were three little tomato plants. Here is a picture of the biggest one:

Volunteer tomato plant

I think it is funny that these volunteer plants grew so well and so quickly, when the ones I planted from seed took months to grow and are still smaller than the volunteers!
The tomato plant I grew from seed

Bailey
I forgot that I have this ridiculous harness/leash thing for Bailey (my roommate and I got it for him in college when he was a kitten and we wanted to let him roam around in our backyard). So I let him hang out outside while I worked in the garden. He enjoyed his little field trip outside and had a grand old time rolling around on the cement and eating the neighbor's grass.

AND FINALLY...

The other things I did this weekend included:
- planted nasturtium seeds in between the sunflowers (in spite of planting them twice, the sunflowers just did not want to grow in certain spaces along the front of the fence... so I'm wondering if maybe nasturtiums will? Plus, the flowers are edible in addition to being gorgeous!) I've had good luck sprouting both of this type of seeds in potting soil/seedling trays, but who knows how they will do in the ground.

- planted onion seeds near the fence next to the pole beans
- weeded out tons of grass, clover, and other little plants that were enjoying my soil during my gardening hiatus

View of my garden from the steps after a weekend of hard work...

That's all... thanks for checking out what's Blooming in Bloomingdale! :-)