I haven’t written anything about our garden since I wrote about planning our 2013 garden back in March. There’s a good reason for that, though–not much has been happening in the garden! I think there’s finally been enough activity that it’s time for an update, though. 
We are using two small raised beds (pictured above), which are part of our apartment complex’s community garden. At the moment they are only housing kale, sugar snap peas and lettuce. Here are the peas and lettuce:
I think both of them look pretty tiny. I planted the peas as seeds on April 1st, but then they didn’t really do much for a month because we had a very cold and snowy April. (We even got close to a foot of snow on May 1st!) Thankfully at least half of the plants survived. I may try planting a few more seeds in the empty spaces to make up for the ones that never sprouted.
The lettuce is also tiny. I started it inside from seeds in the middle of March, but it never seemed to grow very much inside. I transplanted the seedlings outside a few weeks into April–right after which, of course, we got a bunch more snow. Most of the plants survived, but like the peas, they didn’t really do much other than survive for a while. The past couple of weeks we’ve been getting temperatures in the 80s and 90s, though, so the lettuce is finally starting to look like it’s making some progress. It does make me laugh that many people in other parts of the country are already harvesting lettuce now, while my lettuce is just starting to actually resemble lettuce, but that is the nature of living in Colorado, I suppose.
We also have one kale plant in the other bed. I forgot to take a picture of it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it, too, is tiny. Like really minuscule. We’d planted seeds for two kale plants but this is the only one that survived, though, so I’ll take it.
Last weekend we planted our green bean seeds. I was supposed to plant the seeds on May 10th, but it completely slipped my mind until a couple of days ago so we did it a week late. Not a big deal, of course, but it was sort of funny that I forgot about it. We got several days of rain after planting the seeds, so hopefully they will start to do well immediately.
This coming weekend we are going to be transplanting all of our hot weather seedlings: basil, peppers, tomatoes and zucchini. I have been growing all of them inside since March. This is my first year growing anything from seed inside, though, and I am worried that I am doing it wrong. Except for the zucchini, all of my seedlings look sad and pathetic. Here they are getting some sun outside on our balcony:
They spend 15 hours under our grow light every day, but it seems like they haven’t really grown much in weeks. We’re hoping that they’ll suddenly take off once they get outside, but if not we’ll probably also go buy some seedlings at the garden store. We need our homegrown tomatoes and basil this summer!
How is your garden doing?
