The Spring Garden is the Best? For Texas

In the last week or two the garden has just exploded. It's like someone hit a spring switch.

In addition to the lettuce and spinach continuing like mad (we keep eating salad like crazy and finding new recipes for the spinach), the chard is starting to take off and the leeks actually look like leeks now (as opposed to sad chives).

The sugar snap peas and potatoes are growing like gangbusters. Some of each are about a foot tall, I hope some of the peas start flowering soon!

Charlie made new trellises for the tomato plants. We have lots of tomato plants, I am hoping this is an insurance policy on us getting something! We are still garden amateurs, since we started last fall this is the our first round of warm weather plants. We are also practicing square foot gardening and tried to get only space saving varieties (with the exception of the celebrity tomato, which we potted). We will have to keep on top of the pruning.

I was amazed that the tomatoes started flowering only 2 weeks after transplanting! This is a sweet million cherry tomato, and if you look closely at the tip of my finger you can see a blurry image of the first tomato starting to form. Five of our tomato plants already have flowers. Yay!

We have potted zucchini and squash so that we don't have to worry about them spreading over the garden. So far, so good. We are trying to keep an eye out as we heard the squash borers can be quite a problem here.

Finally, ahh sweet sweet strawberries. We have about 20 strawberry plants, and I'd hoped this mean we'd get something from them. This week the strawberries went from just leaves to having 10 flowers. You can see the start of a strawberry here! We will need to find some bird netting stat. I hope they keep coming. I think strawberries are one of the few fruits that you can plant and harvest the same year (melons and possibly transplanted figs are the others I can think of). I would looove fresh fruit.

The oregano is also looking great! I'm glad I gave up on the seeds and bought the transplant. The rosemary, however, doesn't look any difference since the transplant.

 

Mac says he protects the garden from birds and squirrels. Extra treats please!

Garden harvest for the last 2 1/2 weeks: 
 15 cups romaine (we've mostly stopped harvesting whole heads and just harvest the outer leaves, we're concerned it will be too warm to start new plants)
20 cups mesclum salad mix
20 cups spinach
2 cups swiss chard
1 carrot (sad looking though)
2 Tbsp parsley (sounds sad, but I'm excited it finally grew some!)

In addition to these totals there is much more lettuce and spinach ready to harvest but we can't eat it all that fast. As is, we've had salad pretty almost every day we've eaten at home.


Most of the plants are in transition and not quite to bearing food yet. The tomatoes and strawberries are setting fruit, the peas haven't flowered yet, the carrots and basil appear are on their way.