First harvest of the year

Yay! I harvested the very first of my container garden today. Just a salad made of thinnings from my big dish of radishes and some baby spinach, but still good! Only about 10 minutes from growing to served up. All I did was pull up any of the baby radishes that were too close together, break off the root end and wash them well. The baby spinach I pulled larger leaves off all my plants. I need to plant more spinach, I eat a ton of salads and fresh right off the plant is so much better than the junk at the grocery store! There's something primal and intensely satisfying about eating something you grew yourself, even if it's just a little salad!

I added half a chopped up roasted chicken breast on top of the salad and a little light ranch and made lunch of it. Yum :D

On a related note, I think the potting soil I'm using has too much nitrogen. The root veggies don't seem to be getting plump roots, just lots of greens. My baby carrots should have some thickening by now, but nothing. Same with the radishes. At least the radish greens are edible (and yummy!) but the carrots may be a flop. Worst case scenario I toss them to the worms and start over with some garden soil or some plain ol' dirt. Until then - my greenery stuff is all doing really well!

Planting a few more things

The weather is starting to warm up here already. We're expecting a few more chilly days or storms before spring is 100% here, but I decided to plant a few more early things anyway. A couple nights in the 30s should be okay.

I filled up one of these HUGE plastic pots I picked up at Kmart on clearance for about $5 and put it in the corner of the patio. It took 3 bags of potting mix! I put it on a small cinderblock so it can drain since they were out of the drip dishes for this size. I planted several kolrabi seeds in the middle, with a half circle of carrots in front and a half circle of beets in the back.

You can see that my carrots in the container on the left and spinach on the right are doing well right now, getting bigger. There's a larger green pot off to the left off screen which has baby mustard greens and a couple scarlet runner beans that haven't popped up yet. I planted a couple sugar snap peas near the front edge of that pot, yum!

I planted some nasturtiums in these hanging pots. Hopefully they'll hang over the edges and look really pretty! If they do, I'll add some pansies, johnny-jump-ups and violas to these pots. I have them sprouting in Jiffy greenhouses, but they're not growing much.

These are my tomato sprouts. I had them indoors. They sprouted easily and quickly, but have gotten taller than I'd like and aren't putting out real leaves. I moved them outside in the shade yesterday, hopefully getting a bit more sun will make them turn into at least a couple healthy plants for me. These are grown from the heirloom rainbow blend from Gurneys, I'm a little excited to see what colors I get! That is, assuming they grow for me. I never have much luck growing from seeds.

Gardening for the space impaired

I have no space to plant in the ground, so my garden is in pots on the patio. I planted another round of pots today! A bunch of radishes, more mustard greens and some mini carrots. They should be done before it's time to plant my summer vegetables, so I can reuse the pots right after they're harvested. Should be fun! I planted Easter Egg radishes, excited to see what colors come up!

I have pansies, violas and johnny-jump-ups in the Jiffy seed starter, to fill in around everything else with edible flowers. I'm also waiting for chives, lavender and cilantro to sprout. So looking forward to having some fresh herbs in the house!