Fall Planting 2010

I hemmed and hawed about what vegetables to plant for my fall crops.  I ended up deciding against most common brassicas like head cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, because I was worried that they might take up too much room in my square foot gardening boxes.  Maybe I'll try them next year, when we expand our garden with more raised beds in the ground.

Below is a list of fall vegetable seeds sown so far in our garden and their planting dates.  I'm trying out successive planting with some of them.  I would have sown them earlier, but it's just been so hot all of July and August, and I didn't think that these seeds would germinate all that well when day time highs have been consistently in the low to mid 90s.  Our Indianapolis garden is in USDA zone 5b with the average first frost date of around October 20.  I'm curious to see if this year's first frost would be later than this average date, considering how hot it's been so far.

• Crimson Giant Radish – 7/31/10 (probably sowed too early, as they are not growing very well)
• Ruby Queen Beets – 7/31/10 (same as radish, not growing well past initial germination)
• Sugar snap peas (aka butt peas) – 8/1/10
• Carrots (I still have dreams of growing girthy carrots in Indiana) – 8/8/10
• China Choi (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener) – 8/16/10, 8/28/10
• Pak Choi Cabbage – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Tatsoi Cabbage (rosette bok choy) – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Ruby Red Chard – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Fordhook Giant Chard – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Red Russian Kale – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Little Gem Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Ruby Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Red Romaine Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Daikon Radish – 8/22/10

All of these, except for sugar snap peas and carrots, are new vegetables in the garden for me, so I'm really looking forward to watching the plants grow and hopefully eating them.  I know you’re supposed to grow vegetables that you like to eat, but I confess that neither Keith nor I have much prior experience eating a lot of these new vegetables.  Well, Keith already knows that he doesn’t really like radishes and hates beets, and I’m somewhat neutral to both of them, but I’m growing them anyway.

If any of these fall vegetables grow well for us, then I’m going to have to find new recipes to work them into meals.  I figure lettuce is lettuce regardless of the variety, and I can use them in salads.  But what to do with all these new hardy greens like chard, kale, and various chinese cabbages?  This fall is going to be an interesting time for us both in the garden and in the kitchen!

Below are some pictures of germinated seedlings.  I noticed that all of the seeds sprouted more than one seedling.  With very small seeds like Pak Choi, it's possible that I sowed more than one seed in the middle of the square, but with bigger seeds like chards, I know I only sowed one seed in each spot.  Are some of these seeds supposed to germinate more than one seedling from a single seed?  Should I thin these out so there's only one seeding growing in each spot, or should I just  leave them alone?  Can I try to separate out the seedlings and transplant them farther apart without damaging the roots?  Hmm, questions and more questions...

Fordhook Giant Chard

Ruby Red Chard

Red Russian Kale

Pak Choi Cabbage

This post is linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

8/30/10 Harvest - Salad Fixings

We had a very small harvest this week - just some baby lettuce mix and arugula grown in our indoor grow box, and probably the last few cucumbers from our slowly-but-surely dying cucumber vines.  This lull between summer and fall is turning out to be kind of depressing!  Now I have to wait patiently for my fall crops to start growing.

I harvested the baby greens (and reds) from these two containers.  I thought I took a picture of the harvested lettuce, but apparently I forgot to do it.  It wasn't a lot of lettuce, just enough to make two appetizer-sized salads.

I spaced out and did not remember to take a picture of my harvested cucumbers until after I sliced them all up.  My loud "oh no!" probably made Keith think that I cut my finger with the kitchen knife or something.  With the way that our brown and brittle cucumber vines look right now, these may very well be the last cucumbers of the season.  We'll see if we get any more next week.  Otherwise, adiós, garden cucumbers.  See you next year.

I made some tzatziki with these cucumbers, garlic, lemon juice, salt and plain yogurt.  Various recipes said that greek yogurt works the best, but all I had in the fridge was plain yogurt, so that's what I used.  It still turned out pretty yummy, if a bit too garlicky.  That's what happens when you just wing it without following a recipe!

Oh, I almost forgot.  I also harvested about 16 oz of basil.  1 lb of basil doesn't sound like a lot, but it's really a lot of basil.  They filled up a huge serving bowl.  I took all the leaves off the stems (so tedious) and laid them down to dry, as we have enough frozen pesto cubes for now.  They filled up three large pizza pans and four cookie sheets.

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for harvests from other gardeners.

NOT Hale's Best Jumbo

Remember when I thought last week that I had a strange bush type of Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe?  My readers convinced me that not only do I not have a Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe, I may actually have some sort of a weed.  The male flowers have opened, and the plant now has some sort of female flowers (I think), too.  I still have no idea what this plant is.  If you can identify this plant from the flowers, please let me know!  If I really spent the last two months babying this plant that turned out to be just a weed, I might as well know what it is.  Thank you for looking!

Open flower.  The flower buds all look orange, but the flowers are actually yellow.  They only opened for a few hours during the day.

Orange flower buds, and these new things that may be some sort of female flower and/or fruit?

More close-ups of these new female flower/fruit things

The whole plant

Does Your Dog Eat Vegetables?

My sister rescued this dog from the streets of Los Angeles about a month ago.  She took him to a shelter first, where she learned that due to over-capacity issues, the shelter would most likely have to euthanize any new dogs that didn't get adopted out within a few days.  Well, that was completely unacceptable to her, so she did everything she could to try to find the dog's owner.  She put up flyers.  She put up ads.  She went door to door in her neighborhood.  When none of that worked, she then tried to find a new adoptive family for this dog.  When that also didn't work, she went back to the shelter and adopted the dog herself, intending to extend his life while she kept looking for a suitable new family for the dog.  But then she got attached to the dog.  So she named him Wilson (like the "lost" volleyball from the movie Cast Away), and she's now keeping him for herself.

Wilson is a mutt, but apparently he looks most like a Shiba Inu. Yeah, he's a cutie, and he has an adorable pink spot right above his nose.

I met Wilson for the first time while I was back in California about two weeks ago.  Compared to all the other dogs I've known well in my life, Wilson is very well behaved, quick to learn commands, and rather easy-going.  For example, my sister trained him to sit outside her kitchen while she's in there, so that he wouldn't get in the way and beg for food.  And when she brought him over to our mom's house, she taught him to do the same thing outside my mom's kitchen, which he learned to do in just one day.  If Wilson ever met Reese (one of our dogs in Indiana), Reese would ask, "but how would you ever eat anything that fell on the floor during chopping or cooking, if you're just sitting outside the kitchen?"

Speaking of eating, this dog eats VEGETABLES!

After I pulled some girthy carrots from my mom's garden, I brought one in the room to show my sister.  Wilson seemed a bit curious about the carrot, so I tore up some green carrot top and gave it to him, fully expecting him to sniff and turn his nose at it.  But to my surprise, he looked, he sniffed, he touched, and then he ate it!

He looks like he's sleeping in this picture, but he's not.  His eyes are closed because either he was straining himself to tear a bite-size piece from the carrot top, or the camera flash scared him. 

I took him with me to the backyard to harvest more vegetables, and he ate everything I gave him.  He ate some sugar snap peas, zucchini, lettuce and carrots.  His only issue was that he wanted me to cut/slice them into bite sized pieces, like he didn't want to go through the trouble of breaking down the food himself.  What a (cute) weirdo.

"I'm ignoring you."

"Oh, you have more vegetables for me?"

"I'm going back to sleep."

Indoor Grow Box Limitations - Tomatoes

Our Indoor Grow Box is awesome in many ways, but it does have its limitations.  Our tomato plants are growing so well in there to a point where they are growing too tall, too fast for the grow box.  I thought it looked like a jungle in there two weeks ago, but now it's a bit junglier in there. 

The two remaining Jelly Bean tomato plants grew and reached the top of the grow box, and are now starting to grow sideways at a 90 degree angle to its main stem.  They are also looking stressed, having long outgrown the grow box shelter.  I felt so bad for them!  Since a few weeks ago, their siblings were transplanted into individual five-gallon buckets and have been thriving outside, and even starting to set little jelly bean shaped tomatoes.  We left these two plants in the grow box to see what would happen if they grew too big, and now we know.  So we freed one of them and transplanted it into a large planter previously occupied by a now-dead zucchini plant.  Hopefully it will do better outside in its new home. The other plant is still in the grow box, only because we didn't have any more large containers.  If it's still alive, I'll have to figure out something for it next weekend.

I can almost hear this plant saying "ouch, ouch, the ceiling is hurting my head!"

Well, at least now we know how fast they grow.  It's been seven weeks since we started these tomato seeds to test drive our new Indoor Grow Box.  So when we use the grow box "for real" next spring,  I'll know that they will reach their maximum grow box size sometime around 5-6 weeks.  Does that mean I have to start my tomato seeds about 3-4 week before the last frost date, to be transplanted out 2 weeks after the last frost date?  Hmm, I thought most people started them 6-8 weeks before the last frost date in our USDA zone 5b.

If you (that's you, the blog reader!) start your tomato plants from seeds, how early do you start your seeds, and about how big are your plants when you transplant them outside?

Lupe the Cantaloupe

Ever the creative one, Keith named our first melon Lupe, pronounced like the last two syllables of "Guadalupe" (does not rhyme with Cantaloupe).  I thought it was kind of a silly name (setting aside the fact that it's, um, a little silly to name your melon), but it somehow stuck.  So now we talk about Lupe all the time.

Here is my first time meeting Lupe last weekend.  Look how much she's grown since her debut just last week!  I think she was motivated by all the positive encouragement from our blog readers.

 Lupe on August 21, 2010 (Day 57)

Pretty in Pink on August 22, 2010 (Day 58)

Keith and I discussed the need to provide some sort of support for Lupe.  I have seen pictures of knee highs being used as melon support, but we didn't have any knee highs on hand.  So we borrowed this pink bandana from Reese (one of our dogs), who got it from the doggie groomer a few weeks ago.  We promised to return the bandana to Reese, after Lupe was done with it.  Reese didn't seem to mind at all.

We also have a second melon growing on this same plant.  He showed up a few days after Lupe, but he has been growing at a slower pace.  Much slower.  He is also shaped a little lopsided.  Keith has dubbed him Tardo.  We don't talk about him much.  And Keith tells me that this one is now turning yellow as of today.  I guess we really won't talk about him much anymore.

But here is a picture of him, if you must see.  You can also see Sienna (our other dog) in the background, wearing her pink bandana (each dog got her own bandana from the groomer).  Lupe is the blurry melon you see in the back.  Tardo is in the front.

This post is linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

Related Posts:

• First Cantaloupe Harvest (9/27/10)
• Waiting for Lupe the Cantaloupe
• When to Harvest Cantaloupe
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe - Melon on Day 51
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe Update (Day 43)
• Growing SUPERmarket Cantaloupe (Day 7 - 30)

8/23/10 Harvest - Summer to Fall Transition

There have been many changes in our Indiana garden during the last two weeks while I’ve been gone.  Unfortunately, the common theme of these changes appears to be death.  Well, I say “unfortunately” but I suppose this is all part of the natural garden cycle, the inevitable transition from summer to fall.

Early Girl Tomatoes: the tomato plants have been croaking, slowly but surely.  There were still a dozen or so green tomatoes of all sizes left on the plants, but we decided to pull the plants to make room for fall planting.  I understand that green tomatoes picked at their full size will most likely ripen red.  Do immature green tomatoes picked before they reach their final size still ripen eventually?  I guess we’ll find out.

Do you like Keith's artistic presentation of our green tomatoes, plus one red?  I sure did!  That one red tomato actually ripened to that color on the vine, even though the tomato size stayed tiny.

Keith picked these three tomatoes last week as they were just starting to blush.  They had already ripened to this deep red color by the time I got home this past weekend.

Cucumbers: the bottom half of the vines look like they are completely dead - brown and brittle.  However, the top half are still green, and putting on more growth and cucumbers.  We decided to let them live for another week.

Yeah, I know, these cucumbers don't look all that fresh or healthy.  They were picked last week and they are in their it's-been-one-week-in-the-fridge condition in this picture.

Carrots: the Indiana carrots were a total bust this year, very much unlike their girthy California cousins.  Or are they siblings, if the seeds all came from the same seed envelope?  Anyway, we pulled all the carrots from our square foot gardening beds, except for one square that we left alone to see if they would get bigger with more time.

This was "only" about a third of our total harvest.  I'm going to spare you more pictures of our micro carrots.

Onions:  these onions from sets never really sized up properly.  We also discovered that one onion (from a bag of 100 yellow onion sets) was actually a red onion.

Green beans:  our late-spring planting of green beans squeezed out their last harvest about two weeks ago.  We attempted successive plantings of bush beans, but the later plantings of bean plants just got eaten up alive by the cucumber beetles and other evil vegetable-eating bugs, and the new leaves just couldn't grow properly without turning completely hole-y from bug damage.  I gave up and pulled all the remaining bean plants to make room for fall vegetables.

Zucchini: I started out with three zucchini plants this year.  100% germination rate from three seeds, so I thought I was off to a good start.  All three plants grew well and fast.  Then came powdery mildew.  Long story short, I ended up with one zucchini the whole season.  Ugh.

That’s pretty much it for all our spring/summer vegetables.  The only plants still left growing outside are herbs (basil, sage, garlic chives, thyme and oregano), some green onions and our experimental plants in five-gallon buckets:

• SUPERmarket cantaloupe: grown from seeds from a generic supermarket cantaloupe
• Jelly bean tomatoes: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Cayenne peppers: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Mystery plant: we thought this was possibly a bush-type of Hale’s Best Jumbo cantaloupe, but our more experienced garden blogger friends tell us that it looks nothing like any Hale’s Best Jumbo they’ve ever grown, so now we have no idea what it is.  We have now had at least two readers comment that it looks like a weed, possibly in the mallow family.  I am completely baffled.  Could I have been pampering a useless weed for the last two months, in a five-gallon bucket?  Yikes.  If you would like to take a look and tell us what you think, we would very much appreciate it!  Whatever it is, I sure hope it's edible. 

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvests from other gardeners.

Hale's Best Jumbo - Bush Type Cantaloupe?

About seven weeks ago, Keith and I met a guy through craigslist who gave us some of his gardening stuff, including some light fixtures, florescent light bulbs, dozens of small plastic pots, and lots of leftover seeds.  He told us that he had an accident several years ago, and he took up vegetable gardening as a part of his head injury rehabilitation process.  He said that vegetable gardening really helped him a lot, but now he wasn't able to continue for various reasons and he wanted to give his garden stuff away to someone who could use it.

Of all the stuff, I was most excited about my windfall of various seeds.  Unfortunately, the germination rate of some of these seeds were terrible, probably because the guy kept them in his storage unit for a couple of years before finally giving them away to us.  Only one out of the seven cantaloupe seeds germinated, and none of the seven watermelon seeds germinated. 

When I sowed these melon seeds, I knew it was probably way too late in the season to have a realistic chance of getting any melons.  But I was curious about whether the seeds would germinate at all, so I had to sow them.  When one seed germinated, I couldn't just toss the seedling away, so I'm growing it.  I will still be sad if/when the first frost kills the vine before I get any melons, but I guess that's the price I'm willing to pay to satisfy my curiosity.

The germinated cantaloupe (technically it's a muskmelon) variety is Hale's Best Jumbo, and the plant is growing more like a small upright tree and less like a typical melon vine.  The seed envelope does not have any indications, but is it possible that this variety is a bush-type?  Do bush-type cantaloupe or muskmelon varieties really exist?  Google search tells me that they do, but I could not fine any images of bush-type muskmelon plants.  Maybe mine will be the first one on the Internet!

Bush-type Cantaloupe Plant on 8/21/10 (Day 49 after the seed was sown)

Cantaloupe flowers on 8/21/10

Update:
Many helpful readers of this blog left comments on this post saying that this is most definitely not a Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe plant.  Not only that, it's most likely a weed.  How the seed got into the cantaloupe seed envelope, I'll never know.  It's also possible that a random weed seed just landed right in the middle of this five-gallon bucket at the same time that I sowed the cantaloupe seeds, and this plant started growing.  We're trying to figure out the identity of this plant.  It has been further discussed in another post: NOT Hale's Best Jumbo.

SUPERmarket Cantaloupe - Melon on Day 51

Folks, we finally have a visible (and hopefully viable) melon on the plant grown from a supermarket cantaloupe seed!  I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes yet, but I can't wait to go home this weekend to see it for myself.

Considering that this plant started flowering (with just male flowers) more than three weeks ago, it has taken forever for the female flowers to show up.  Keith has been diligently combing over this plant for any signs of female flowers so that he could hand-pollinate them to ensure fruit set.  We had some doubts about his pollinating technique, after he told me that his hand-pollinated zucchini died, but doubt no more!  Keith is now a proud papa of our new cantaloupe baby.

August 15, 2010 (Day 51)

August 16, 2010 (Day 52)

The pictures are a bit blurry because they came from Keith's camera phone.  I wasn't sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but Keith said that this baby melon's size visibly increased in just one day.  If I remember correctly, I read somewhere on the Internet that cantaloupe typically takes about five weeks to reach maturity after fruit set.  So our target melon tasting date is sometime around mid-September.

Initially, I thought that I would be happy just to get one melon out of this plant, just to see if I could grow it.  But now that I have one, I'm wondering how many more I could get to grow on this plant.  Such is human nature, eh? 

Visit An Oregon Cottage for more Tuesday Garden Party posts.

Related Posts:

• First Cantaloupe Harvest (9/27/10)
• Waiting for Lupe the Cantaloupe
• When to Harvest Cantaloupe
• Lupe the Cantaloupe (Day 57 and 58)
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe Update (Day 43)
• Growing SUPERmarket Cantaloupe (Day 7 - 30)

8/16/10 Harvest - California Garden

This week's harvest is from my "other" garden at my mom's house in California, where I spent this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed some civilized weather (highs in the 70s, lows in the 60s) after enduring months of brutal heat in Middle America.  Anyway, I sowed the seeds for carrots, sugar snap peas, and zucchini about three months ago during my last visit, along with some onions sets.  That plus asking my mom on the phone how "my vegetables" are doing once a week is about the extent of my involvement with these vegetables.

The onions didn't size up much.  The sugar snap pea vines are about 3/4 dead (brown and brittle), but the remaining 1/4 of the vines are still putting on new growth, blossoms, and peas - they just keep going like the energizer bunny!  The zucchini plant has gotten very big and is just about covered with powdery mildew, but they are still growing new fruits.  The carrots just amazed me with their size.

Look at these carrots!  I discussed the Girthy Carrot on Saturday.  After pulling the largest carrot, I stopped at five, because I didn't know what my mom would do with so many big carrots all at once.  There are still another dozen or so of these in the ground.  Ugh, why can't I grow carrots like this in my garden in Indiana, instead of the puny little matchstick ones? 

I didn't sow these seeds, but this salad mix is also from my mom's garden.  All kinds of lettuce seem to grow really well here, pretty much all year long.  It's kind of bizarre, really.  I would love to give credit to my mom for having a green thumb, but I honestly don't think that she does - she still waters everything from the top with a garden hose!

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvest stories.

Girthy Carrot

This is the girthiest carrot I've ever seen.  And I grew it!  Well, sort of.

While I was visiting my mom in Southern California during Mother's Day weekend, I sowed some carrot seeds in her side yard.  So I can take credit for starting them, but not much else.  Fast forward three months, and I'm back in CA this weekend with a chance to check on *my* vegetables again.  And holy carrot, this is one girthy carrot!

These seeds came from the exact same envelope of Burpee's Short 'n Sweet carrots that I sowed in my Indiana garden.  My first Indiana carrots made their debut two weeks ago, with carrots the size of matchsticks.  I don't know why these carrots are growing so well in California, but not in Indiana.  Maybe they like the unusually cool CA summer this year (with highs around 70s so far this summer), compared to the hot 90+ F summer we've been having in Indiana?

Butt Peas

Are you all familiar with T9, the predictive text technology for mobile phones?  Because I still don't have an iPhone, blackberry, Droid or one of those other smartphones (I know, I know, how prehistoric of me), I have my simple phone set on T9 mode for texting.  It works fine for the most part, but I do have to watch out for some common words that have the same number combination.

For example, when I press 6-3 to type me, sometimes the phone automatically types of.  Other common confusing word pairs are: them-then; sun-run; go-in.  OK, you get the idea.

Anyway, I looked up the weather for Indianapolis this morning and saw that they were forecasting HOT (aka 90+ F degrees) for the rest of the week.  This made me really worry about the fall peas that I just sowed two weekends ago.  As I learned earlier this summer, peas do not fare well in the heat!  So I texted Keith to ask about the peas, but apparently my text went through like this:

"rear doing okay?"

Fortunately, Keith is familiar with my texts often containing random T9-generated words, so he knew right away that I was in fact asking about the well-being of the peas, and not his butt.  Because that would be weird.  And because we are a couple of adults in our early thirties who still appreciate junior high humor, the remainder of the text conversation quickly degenerated into something about playing with peas in the rear.  Awesome.

In case you're wondering, the peas have germinated and are reportedly putting on some height even in this heat.  I asked Keith to take a close-up of the rear.  I mean, the peas.

Sugar Snap Peas on 8/11/10 (Day 11)

From here on out, I shall call these peas, BUTT PEAS!  That sounds better than Rear Peas, don't you think?


Related Post:

• Sugar Snap Peas in California vs. Indiana

SUPERmarket Cantaloupe Update

Remember my SUPERmarket cantaloupe experiment, where I planted the seeds from a plain ol' melon I bought at the grocery store?  I'm happy to report that the one plant transplanted into a five gallon bucket has been thriving with lots of flowers.  It's kind of hard to see all the flowers with the sun shining from behind, but trust me, they are there! 

 August 7, 2010 (Day 43)

If you would like to see the pictures from Day 7 to Day 30, please click here.

Unfortunately, most of the flowers are still just male flowers.  Ladies, it's time to join the melon party!

Actually, Keith did spot one female flower last week, but it must not have gotten properly pollinated, because all I saw was the evidence of a shriveled up dead flower when I came back last weekend.  I'm hoping that was just the beginning and that we will get more female flowers soon.  We still have about 9 weeks left of the growing season before the first average frost date here in zone 5b, so I'm really hoping that we can get at least one or two melons out of this plant before then.

If only "hoping" made everything work out in the garden!

Visit An Oregon Cottage for more Tuesday Garden Party posts.

Related Post:

• First Cantaloupe Harvest (9/27/10)
• Waiting for Lupe the Cantaloupe
• When to Harvest Cantaloupe
• Lupe the Cantaloupe (Day 57 and 58)
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe - Melon on Day 51 
  
• Growing SUPERmarket Cantaloupe (Day 7 - 30)

8/9/10 Harvest and Grow Box Jungle

The harvest this week was rather small, in quantity as well as in vegetable sizes.  Our Early Girl tomato plants are still producing tomatoes, but individual tomatoes seem to be getting smaller every week.  My spreadsheet tells me that I'm not just imagining this problem.  Hmm, would some fertilizer help with this problem, or is this normal for growing tomatoes?

The bush beans squeezed out a few more green beans, because I just couldn't bring myself to pull the three remaining ratty plants that still had some blossoms left last week.  Maybe next week.

The cucumber plants gave us only one cucumber this week, but I spotted several baby cucumbers on the plants, so hopefully we can get more cukes in a week or two.

Although our harvest was pretty dismal this week, our plants are growing really well in the indoor grow box.

 Indoor Grow Box Overview 8/8/10

On the top shelf, we have basil, cayenne peppers, jelly bean tomatoes, and some cilantro (started just last week).  When I started the pepper and tomato seeds in the grow box about a month ago, it was just an experiment to see how well the grow box would work to germinate seeds.  But they have been growing so well that I'm starting to wonder if we might get lucky and actually get some peppers and tomatoes out of them this year.  We transplanted a few of the seedlings outdoors, just to give them the best chance to grow during the rest of this season.  The remaining plants, we'll keep inside the grow box for as long as we can and see what happens.  I just spotted what look like tiny pepper blossoms starting to appear, so yeah, I'm totally getting my hopes up!

Are these really the beginnings of pepper blossoms?

In the middle, we have nasturtium and several different kinds of cut-and-come-again lettuce, including arugula.  Would you like to see the difference between indoor and outdoor nasturtium?

Nasturtium in the back; the rest are lettuce and arugula

More Lettuce

On the bottom shelf, we have some more experimental seeds, a new flat of spinach seeds (not yet germinated), and a few rosemary seedlings with a serious growth problem.  Okay, I know it's not fair to compare rosemary with fast growing annuals like cucumbers or green beans.  I did read that rosemary is hard to germinate from seed, and very slow to grow; but I had no idea that it would be this slow!  These seeds were sown in May, so they've been growing for almost three months now, and their heights range from 1/4 inch to barely an inch.  They are really testing my patience, but hopefully I'm more stubborn than they are.  Eventually, I really would like to have a rosemary bush (or even several) that I could point to and say, "I grew that from seed!"

Three Month Old Rosemary Seedlings

Happy Harvest Monday celebration continues over at Daphne's Harvest Monday.