Welcome to Garden 2017!

And the old man remains standing, we think this is this Habanero Pepper plant's third year.  We pruned away the dead parts that didn't make it through the winter and he is ready to face another year and season.  He'll get a bit of TLC through the year and we hope to have a couple of more to join him soon.  We're looking to get some Habanero Jelly out of our efforts this year as we plan to make our own since the source for pepper jelly we had died a few years back and the stock of what he left is gone.  We'll also put some Jalapeños as well and some sweet peppers.  Those are just a few veggies in our plans for this year.

This is a look today at a good bit of our garden in its infancy right now.  These are some of the containers with seedlings in them already growing.  The cups contain tomatoes of the Creole, Zapatero, Black cherry, and Rio Grande varieties.  To te left in the picture are two of the first three planters we started Tiny Tim Tomatoes in with Genovese, Thai, and Dark Opal Basil seeds in them.  there will be more of those for a staggered planting meant to keep us in tomatoes until the big boys start coming in.  We have several trials ongoing on some other stuff and will let you know if they succeed.  Now for a little old news.

To the right are two of the plants from over the winter.  The left one is an Aloe Very which is coming into bloom and we're permitting it just to see what it looks like and maybe get some good pictures if we're lucky.  On its right is a five gallon container we planted with carrots in the Fall.  They are just about ready to pull and we're looking forward to that.  Carrots are one of the veggies we've had a tough time growing and getting to any kind of size.  But it looks like maybe we've been blessed this time.  While we've already scattered some carrot seed in among the lettuce we've sowed seed for, this is a pretty good lesson that for us carrots may be better planted in the Fall for a Spring harvest for us.

The same thing could be said for Garlic, which we also planted in the Fall using cloves from bulbs purchased from our local grocery store  They seem to be doing pretty well off as well.  The few checks we've made showed us they were not ready yet.  But we'll probably check again today to see what we've got.  We'll be happy if everything comes up fine because we do love garlic in our food and nothing beats the cloves.  We were happy to see these grow!

To the right, here, is a volunteer Sweet Potato plant which has taken root from the vine.  There are several more, giving us an idea we'll get into in a later report.

And here are the bunching onions.  Those are from a stock started five years ago by our housemates and which we keep dividing every year and keep replanting some while eating the rest.  So no seed cost there.  On to the rest.

The French Marigolds we thought killed off by the last cold snap didn't completely perish and we're already getting some spring blooms going.  That is a plant that will stick around through the year so we're looking forward, God willing, to some more beauty because those tend to sprout flowers with different color schemes of burgundy and gold.  We've also planted some Sugar Baby Watermelon seeds in the back of the planter, where there is some room so that we'll have vines cascading down the back and into the garden beyond to join the party we plan to have going soon.  Ours is a long-term plan to build soil with some short-term benefits in the way of vegetables and fruit.  Nothing is wated and everything towards that long term goal.

This container has two kinds of volunteer plants going.  There are some morning glories of one of the so-called Moon Flower varieties.  The other appears to be Amaranth, which I'm going to have to move out of the container to get what I intend to do in that bed.  I do have a place to put them in the planned scheme of things so we'll see if they are.  If they are we should have a beautiful front garden this year.

The same variety of Moon Flower is also growing in the bed around the bottom of the container as well, though, one has to look kind of closely to see them.  Yesterday we sowed some California Bluebell and Purple Coneflower seeds in a layered scheme from front to back in that bed.  We will plant what we think are the Amaranth seedlings in the other front bed at the back and will put Jalapeño Pepper plants in front of them.  The Amaranth would be Love Lies Bleeding and we think the combination across the front will look nice if everything turns out fine.

Yesterday we also sowed seed for Chinese Cabbage, miniature Bock Choy, Giant Red, Butter Crunch lettuce along with one of those tiny varieties of Lettuce we can't remember the name of at the moment and we sowed carrot seeds in among them since the brassicas tend to get along well with the carrots.  We also sowed all three varieties of Basil mentioned earlier at the front part of the bed as a border.  We're not done planting by any means, but we now have a good start on the garden.  Oh, the Brassicas were planted so the smaller ones are at the part of the bed at the front of the house and work their way towards the faucet in blocks of larger plants.  We did this hoping to have a pleasing effect when seen from the street out front.

We do have volunteer morning glories in the usual spot and we have some beans growing as well in the spot they really liked last year.  One of the good things about the containers for a small garden which makes the cost worth it is that we can grow different kinds of plants in the same place in the beds year after year and only need to rotate the containers, not the plants, from year to year.  That's what we do with some of the plantings.  With the other beds we amend.

So, that's our start on the year.  And as always: