My Garden Grows - Part 2

Since the garden is doing so well, I thought I'd post some new photos of its progress. I'm happy with all of it except that the garlic and onions seem to be having a poor year. I've tried fertilizing and keeping up with watering, but they seem to have stopped growing. I'll wait and see! Otherwise everything looks beautiful and we found our first baby sugar-snap pea yesterday! 

 

The sugar-snap peas taking advantage of the trellis. I love these sweet curly tendrils!

The red beets and carrots are coming right along. I've been thinning them a little at a time so we can eat the tender greens in salads and stir-fries.

I'm especially happy with these tomatillo plants we got from Stoney Plains Organic Farm at the Wallingford Farmers Market. We've only had them a few weeks and they've shot up to over 2 feet tall with tons of blossoms!

These sweet mizuna blossoms are great in salads!

Marigolds are helping deter nematodes and flying insects while they attract slugs and snails away from the other plants.

I love that our garden is attracting so many pollinators.

And on that beautiful note, adieu!

My garden grows! (Well, it will soon)

Yesterday the sun came out! We jumped into our shoes, hopped on our bikes and flew off to buy seeds. Until January of this year we've been regulars of Full Circle Farm and have feasted on delicious farm-grown vegetables. But in the spirit of saving money and producing more of our own food, we decided to put our membership on hold and see if we could survive on what our garden can grow. Then, of course, this unseasonably rainy spring arrived in Seattle! I know, I know, it's Seattle. It rains. But we normally get those sunny days peeking through and providing perfect planting days. It's a little later than hoped, but yesterday was finally one of those days that happily fell on a weekend!

There was a night in January when we were packing for a month-long trip to Mexico and we realized that we had forgotten to plant garlic and it would be too late by the time we got back. It was raining and muddy and I think it was about 2 in the morning. But we put our muck boots on and planted two garlic head's worth of cloves anyhow because, well, we love garlic even more than we love sleep.   

The little garlic plants poked their heads up a few weeks ago and they were interspersed with about 300 onions that came up from our landlords' seed from last year. We thinned the onions way down, moved them to one part of the raised bed along with two stray leeks that also showed up this year, and replanted our precious garlics in two rows. Two garlics into 22 plants! Not too shabby I say!

We also sowed in beets, carrots, yellow squash, sugar snap peas and bush beans, and there is still so much room!

The rain came back just as I was finishing laying the twine (ahem, yarn) along the rows. I'll keep you updated on how our little garden is growing!

Update:  Our landlords read this post and let us know that, oops! Those 300 onions were actually pesky ornamentals that they'd tried to get rid of but keep coming back!  So we pulled them and planted mizuna, something that can't easily be mistaken for any type of onion-family plant, in their spot. Ah the silly mistakes of the novice gardener! At least I didn't mistake water hemlock for parsley, as I hear is pretty common (and unfortunate!)