The Garden's Progress 12 Days After Planting

An Overview: Peggy has been watering the garden beds conscientiously every day. The soaker hose that you can see in the large bed is connected to the faucet on the rain barrel. So far, the garden has not sustained any noticeable damage from birds, bugs, squirrels, or rabbits - we hope this will continue, since we have now removed the protective screens from the root bed and the herb patch/salad bowl. We have a few small weeds coming up, but they have been easy to remove.

And now, on to the root vegetable bed:

Bok choy, before thinning. The seedlings were looking pretty crowded, so Virginia thinned them out a bit after this photo was taken.

Radishes, also before thinning. Ditto the above.

Carrots and bunching onions are also starting to appear, but the seedlings are still too small to photograph well. No sign of the parsnips, but apparently the seeds will take quite a long time to germinate. We will be patient.

We have lots of growing activity in the herb bed and salad bowl, but unfortunately very little of it makes for exciting photos...

Garlic. This stuff has been growing crazy fast.

Spinach. A poor photo, however - the seedlings look much happier in person!

Appearing in the large bed, we have:

Snow peas. These are very attractive and sturdy seedlings.

Green (pole) beans, galore.

Eight ball zucchini (top) and Pattypan squash (bottom).

Peggy and Virginia planted two Tumbling Tom tomato seedlings yesterday, but they declined to be photographed. Just about everything else in the large bed seems to be growing happily, with the possible exception of the cowpeas. So far, only one seed has sprouted...we are wondering if the free seed from Logan's was a bit old. Time will tell.

One bit of disappointing news: The gardeners have become increasingly unimpressed with the soil purchased from Page Road Garden Center. In our view, it has far too many stones and far too little organic content. Consequently, we have been amending the soil with compost as we transplant seedlings into the garden. Virginia also plans to make gravel walkways between the beds with all of the stones she has removed from the dirt! Looks like we will be doing some major soil improvement after our first harvest and before out second planting of the year.