Garden Update: June 4, 2013

Garden Update June 4 2013

We spent last weekend planting our container garden plus a few more plants in our raised bed garden, so I thought it was time for another garden update. In that picture above you can see our container garden, which resides out on our apartment balcony. Even though we have two raised beds in the community garden this year, we still opted to do a container garden because we had such success with it last year. The balcony is south-facing and it gets incredibly hot out there in the summer, which I think makes it a perfect location for heat-loving plants.

As you can see, we’re growing tomatoes and basil. Although I started tomatoes and basil from seed this year, my seedlings were very small and puny. Since Colorado already has a short growing season, we decided to cut our losses and buy some seedlings from a garden store to ensure that we would still get a good harvest of tomatoes and basil. This actually turned out to be a fun adventure, as we discovered an awesome nursery in town that had a lot of different heirloom seedlings. And they weren’t even very expensive (only $3 per seedling), so it’s good to know that that option exists if my own seedlings fail again next year.

The three smaller pots in the sun look like they’re empty–but they’re actually housing some of my tiny basil seedlings. They don’t appear to be that hardy, but we had the pots and the dirt so we figured we’d throw them in there and see what happens.

The round pot in the shade is currently empty. I was thinking of growing some cilantro in it, but I was just reading that cilantro does better in cooler weather, so perhaps that’s not a good option. Any other ideas?

Two beds

Moving on, here’s a shot of our two community garden beds. They look pretty barren from here, but things are actually growing…

peas

Here are the sugar snap peas. After that slow start, they’ve really been taking off lately.

lettuce and tomatoes

Here is another one of the tomato seedlings we bought, plus half of the lettuce. I am so proud of that lettuce. It has gotten so big, compared to those tiny seedlings that I planted outside a few weeks ago. I actually picked some for the first time yesterday. I’ve read that harvesting it while the leaves are on the smaller side helps keep it from bolting in the heat, so ideally we will be able to keep picking it for a good while.

green beans

The green beans are growing well, too. I can’t believe how big they are after only a couple of weeks.

cherry tomato and lettuce

Here’s another tomato seedling plus the rest of the lettuce.

tiny tomato

Since we had the space for it, we decided to also leave a few of my tiny tomato seedlings in the garden to see if they actually do anything. A few of them bit the dust already, but at least a couple are still alive and have even started growing a few new leaves. It will be interesting to see if they ever become productive.

tiny pepper

As with the tomatoes, we decided to leave my tiny pepper seedlings, too. They have all survived but don’t appear to be growing at all. I am curious to see what happens to these as well.

How is your garden growing?

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One Response to Garden Update: June 4, 2013

  1. Janis says:
    I've never heard that picking lettuce small helped prevent early bolting. Thank you! Great to see the pictures - your beds look terrific! I would go ahead and plant the teeny basil. They'll just mature later, and you'll still like basil in August, right?

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