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! :)