Rosemary from Seed - Update

I started growing some rosemary from seed last May.  The first four months of excruciatingly slow growth were described here.  Since then, we've taken the low maintenance approach of just ignoring it altogether except watering once every other week or so.  Apparently the rosemary likes it that way, because it's still growing.  It's not exactly growing fast, but it's growing.

Rosemary on April 2, 2011 (at about 10 1/2 months)

We took this picture with the rosemary on the kitchen counter right next to the wall light switch for size comparison.  That tall stem standing straight up is actually leaning up against a wooden craft stick for support.  It looks like the rosemary is starting to branch out (the beginning of a tiny little rosemary bush??), so maybe it's time to transfer it to a bigger container.

4/10 Harvest - Overwintered CA Veggies

This week's harvest is from the California garden.  I suppose you could call all these vegetables "over-wintered," although coastal southern California winter is nothing like winter in Indiana (or anywhere with snowy winters).

Red Russian Kale

Red Russian Kale has been growing really well.  It has been a true cut-and-come-again workhorse in the garden, very unlike bok choy and tatsoi that only yielded one harvest before going kaput.  I noticed that this kale grew more green in California compared to in Indiana where it grew a bit more red/purple, even though the seeds all came from the same place.  I think it has to do with the temperature.  I seem to remember reading somewhere that freezing temperatures make the red/purple color more pronounced in Red Russian Kale.

Cilantro

Fall-planted cilantro grew throughout the winter, but it has finally bolted.  The bolting doesn't seem to have changed the flavor of the cilantro, so some of the lower leaves were harvested.

Bolted Cilantro

Flowering stalks from bolting cilantro seem to grow at lightning speed.  These bolting cilantro "trees" are at least 4-5 feet tall.

Bolted Cilantro going to Vegetable Heaven

If we needed more cilantro, more of these leaves could have been harvested.  But one can only use so much cilantro in a week or two, you know?

Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard

After a slow start, swiss chard has been growing fairly well all winter/spring.  The problem with chard is that pests (birds/bugs, I think) love them and seem determined to turn them into swiss cheese chard, although this picture shows off mainly non-holey leaves.

Sugar Snap Peas

Here's the last harvest of the sugar snap peas planted last fall.  The vines were very productive all winter and spring, but they have finally reached their limit.

Sugar Snap Peas for planting

These dried pea pods were discovered as the spent sugar snap pea vines were pulled from the garden.  Although I didn't mean to save any seeds, I guess these peas just saved themselves by hiding in the middle of the thick vines.  I just learned from the internet that all peas are open-pollinated, so these peas will be saved to be planted in the garden this fall. 

Short 'n Sweet Carrots

See the carrot on the left side of this picture?

Front

Here's the front side view of the carrot.  Doesn't look so bad, right?

Back

The back side is a whole another story.  This carrot grew right next to one of the paver stones, and I think it must have grown around/under it, hence the 90 degree angled indentation in the middle, and a few extra lumps.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Growing Garlic

Now that the snow is totally gone (for good until next winter, I hope), the supermarket garlic I planted last Halloween seems to be fully thriving.

I planted 22 garlic cloves in this raised bed, and all of them sprouted.  There was one that was looking a little sickly (scrawny wilty leaves compared to all the rest of them) when I had my first chance to take a good look after all the snow melted around three weeks ago, but now it's looking much better. 

Since these are generic supermarket garlic, I'm assuming that they are all softneck and that I won't have the pleasure of enjoying garlic scapes - only produced by hardneck garlic, from what I understand - this year.  But at least these are growing, and I'm looking forward to my first garlic harvest later this summer.

The peas are alive

The peas that I sowed on March 19th (because I read somewhere that peas are traditionally sown right after St. Patrick's Day; also, it was a nice warm-ish day on March 19th) have finally germinated after nearly two weeks.  I took this picture last Saturday (4/2/11).

I recently read on other garden blogs about some of the more experienced gardeners soaking their peas in either plain water or Vitamin C water before sowing them.  I didn't know about any of this, so I sowed dry peas straight out of the seed envelope.  Fortunately, I had really good germination - over 95%, I think.  Yes, it did take almost two weeks for these peas to germinate, but I think that had more to do with the cold freezing temperatures right after my sowing day, and less to do with the fact that the peas were dry.  I do remember from last year that the dry peas germinated relatively quickly (3-5 days) under "normal cool" temperatures.

I did not have much luck growing peas in Indiana last year (on the other hand, the peas I sowed in my mom's California garden thrived all fall/winter/spring long).  The spring peas were planted too late to have enough cool weather to grow, and the fall peas were obliterated by cutworms.  This year, I have high expectations for these peas.  I'm growing a few different varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas.  I planted two rows of them across one of my raised beds - that's two 12-foot rows of sugar snap and snow peas.  Hopefully they will all grow well and give me more than a handful of peas.

Overwintered perennial herbs

It was time for these perennial herbs to come out of winter hibernation.  They were kept in a covered growing rack (a small greenhouse thing we got for free to review from CSN last year) that we kept outside all winter long.  I didn't look inside the greenhouse at all during the winter, but I'm sure everything stayed frozen in there most of the time.  But a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing bits of green through the vinyl cover, so I knew the perennial herbs survived the long winter.

I started a few sage plants from seeds in the late spring of 2010.  The plant turned dry and gray over the winter, but it's been working hard these last few weeks to put on some new leaves.

Here is a part of the oregano madness that I started in the summer of 2009 from seeds.  I initially grew oregano in the ground, but they grew like monsters, spread out of control and threatened to take over the whole garden last summer.  So I pulled them all out, and just kept a tiny bit of the plant to replant in a small pot.  It looked rather unhappy for a while, and was still looking kind of brown and wilty at the end of last fall.  But it must have gotten over it, because now it's growing lots of new soft green leaves.  Oregano is going to be strictly confined to containers for me from here on out.

Here's a potted thyme, and this one has the same history as the oregano.  They were started from seeds in 2009, but the growth got out of control in the ground, so they were all pulled out except for a small clump of tangled mess that got planted in a container.  After repotting, the thyme looked fairly dead and stayed that way all winter long.  But it looks like it's ready to experience life one more time.  I'm seeing healthy green growth coming out of the woody stems.  I'm wondering if it needs a haircut.

All these pictures were taken right after they came out of the greenhouse.  After going 4-5 months without any water, they now have water and sunshine.  So they should be well on their way to once again being productive members of the edible garden this season.

4/4 Harvest - Overwintered Peppers

I'm officially declaring my experiment with overwintering peppers indoors a big success.  We harvested an occasional pepper here and there throughout this winter as needed, but today we harvested most of the cayenne peppers from the indoor pepper plant. My first "big" harvest of 2011, and I totally forgot to weigh it.  Sigh.  After a long winter, I guess I'm just out of practice with harvesting and reporting.

Most of the harvested peppers were already dry (because we left them on the plant unharvested for so long), but there were a few "young" peppers in there as well, as you can see in the picture above.

Above is a full body shot of the cayenne pepper plant in all its glory before we harvested the peppers.  Well, actually you can't see the peppers all that well in this picture, but they were really there.

Here's a close-up with some peppers and new blossoms.  I posted last December that this plant was starting to put on new blossoms.  After that, the blossoms and new peppers just kept coming all winter long with hardly a break, which we thought was pretty cool.  And, the pepper plant stayed green and healthy the whole time.  The best part about it all was that this plant required pretty much zero maintenance from us, aside from watering once every week or two.  Ahh, if only the rest of vegetable gardening was that simple.

Keith asked me if I was going to put the plant outside again after the weather warms up.  And the answer is... I haven't decided.  My first thought was, why fix something if it's not broken?  But who knows, maybe it will do even better outdoors in the summer heat.

Aside from the peppers, there's been many new garden activities and I'm past due on some garden updates.  Without making any promises, I'll try to post more often this week to catch up on all the garden happenings.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Growing Tomato Seedlings

I'm worried about my rear, er, I mean, my peas.  I thought I was doing the right thing by direct sowing my peas right after St. Patrick's Day, when it felt nice and warm (relatively speaking).  I thought the spring was finally here.  Unfortunately, the frigid winter weather came back to Indiana right after I sowed my peas, and now I'm worried that they are all toast.  I guess I will find out soon.

In the meantime, I've been busy tending to the indoor tomato seedlings.

Yes, these are all tomato seedlings, with a few peppers thrown in for good measure.  I didn't actually mean to grow so many tomatoes this year, but I was gifted a stack of tomato seed envelopes (15+ heirloom varieties)  that were about 6 years old by a Craigslister last year, and I wanted to see if any of them were still viable.  So I planted them all by throwing 6 seeds (of the same variety) into each cell of the cell packs, and wouldn't you know it, I saw germination in just about every single cell with anywhere from 1-6 sprouts.  Ack, I felt like the gardener version of Octomom.  Right now, I have multiple seedlings per variety growing under lights, but I'll probably end up transplanting only one plant per variety.  I would grow more, but I don't think I have enough room in the garden.

By the way, this is the new grow light setup that I convinced Keith to build for me.  After considering various less-than-optimum options for a grow light setup in the house (we just don't have any extra room to set up tables and hang lights), Keith came up with the brilliant idea of hanging a couple of shop lights under the breakfast bar and re-purposing a spare shelf piece (the kind for closets) to support seedling trays. At the moment, the shelf is propped up by a couple of bricks sitting on the bar stools so that the seedlings can be close to the lights, and we'll adjust/remove the bricks as the seedlings grow taller to give them more growing room.

All of the seeds were first germinated in recycled egg cartons and cell packs in our grow box.  But I discovered that the seedlings were leaning towards the light, which is unfortunately set up vertically in the middle of the grow box.

I was really losing sleep thinking about how these seedlings were growing leaning towards the light.  But now that we have a new grow light setup, hopefully these babies will grow up straight.

Speaking of babies, these tomatoes are going to be ahem, "legitimate" babies because Keith and I are getting married in May.  Of all the things to fuss about over planning a wedding, would you believe that one of my top concerns is how the vegetable garden is going to fare without us during our two week honeymoon?  Priorities, you know.