The Veggie Patch is Born

It has been go go go in The Patch for about a week now. Spring appeared one day.  She just quit all her lollygagging and walked right in.  It's been full on wonder ever since.

The Beds:

Tomatoes and Cucumbers:  I have taken six of my tomato seedlings and two of the strongest looking cucumbers and planted them in one of the sunnier beds. The stress of transplantation has since killed about at least two of the tomatoes and the cucs are looking a bit sad, but seem to have survived. We have plenty of time to replant with starters, but I'm going to give everyone another week to see if there is new growth. We are experimenting with three different types of trellis; Stem spirals for some tomatoes, collapsible cages for others, and I've created some climbing trellis for the cucs out of plastic garden fencing and left over bits of flooring from the kitchen. Perhaps a more gradual hardening would help out next time.

Peppers:  The sunniest bed has naturally been reserved for the peppers. They never really got enough sun in the box to start growing in earnest, so we transplanted some of the tiniest little seedlings.  Honestly, it was really just an experiment and place holder.  I didn't really expect them to survive, but they seem to have fared better than the tomatoes with very little indication of stress.  Very little indication of growth either, but I'm thinking no news is good news at least for the next few days. 

Peas and bulbs: The corner bed, and likely the one to receive the least light has been planted with snap peas, which could have gone in the ground a bit earlier, but I'm expecting to plant cyclically until summer is too hot. The bulbs are all kitchen transplants. Organic onions from Trader Joes and garlic from a friend's friend's garden. More on the bulbs later.  Oh, and I almost forgot. We threw some carrot seeds in that bed as well.

Beans and Squash: The fourth bed is half trellised with two colors of long beans and three edible squash plants. The squash did as well as anyone else in the transplantation, having begun to grow their necks up from the soil this week. The beans, well, I'm pretty sure there is something going on under there. We shall shortly see.

Lettuces: Another part shade bed planted with the stringy little lettuces I have been growing for the past 6 weeks; two chard, three arugula, three butter lettuce, three romaine. After what appeared to be a very stressful couple days, they have begun to rapidly develop leaves and look as though they might actually be ready for a late spring salad. I hope you all like salad. It might be all we have to eat from the garden for a while.