My garden in April

It’s really and truly Spring now, and it’s garden time.  It’s warm during the day, cool at night, and everything is green now.  Even the trees all have leaves (thanks to our unseasonably warm March – which also means that my allergies kicked into gear early, they are now almost over, so everybody wins).

Thanks to Spring, my garden is now starting to look like a real garden.  (If you call a patio garden a “real” garden.  I do.)  We’ve been busy filling containers with dirt and putting plants in them, and those plants are growing a little taller every day.  While my baby tomato plants are still hiding away in the basement, waiting for the weather to get just a bit warmer, the lettuce, spinach, and peas have taken off.  Each day when I come home from work, there’s something new to see.

I’m stunned by the greens.  Last year, when we planted greens from seed, literally nothing happened.  They never germinated.  This year, well, this is what we’re left with after doing some aggressive thinning.  We might end up with more spinach, mizuna, and mesclun lettuce than we can eat.  Or at least, far more than I expected.

But what really amazes me are the peas.  We planted these sugar snap peas about the same time as the lettuce, and they’re huge!

My favorite thing about these guys is how they climb.  The first time I trained one over towards their trellis, and it grabbed hold, I bounced up and down.  But more amazing still, now they’re grabbing onto the trellis all on their own.  Look how they’re growing around it:

It’s fun just to watch them, and I can’t wait until they really start growing up the trellis.

We’ve also got potatoes, and I’m optimistic about them because everything I’ve read says that potatoes are the easiest things in the world.  If you believe the stories, it’s hard to put a potato in the ground and not get a plant.  We’re growing Caribe potatoes, which have a beautiful purple skin – I wanted something unusual, that I couldn’t just buy at the store.  They’re in a grow bag, which should make it easy to cover the stems with dirt as they grow (to keep the developing potatoes out of the light).

You can’t see it in the larger picture, but just a few days ago, the first sprouts appeared.

The one real unknown, this year, is the raspberries.  I absolutely love raspberries, and I miss having them in the backyard like I did growing up.  I read in a couple places that you can, in theory, grow raspberries in containers, but couldn’t find a thing about how to do it.  So (after a lot of encouragement from Nathan, who’s in support of my crazy experiment) I ordered some berry canes and planted them in these 4+ gallon plastic buckets that I scavenged from our local food co-op.

I have no idea whether this will give them enough space.  I don’t know if the single stakes will give them the support they need.  So far, a couple have started leaves, which is a promising sign, but I’m just keeping my fingers crossed to see if they bear fruit.

Apart from that, the rest is ordinary: a box of kale, a few herbs, and some strawberry plants from a kind coworker.  I can’t wait to have fresh strawberries off the vine!

Most of the seeds we started indoors (with the exception of the kale) are still indoors.  The peppers never did much, but the tomatoes are starting to look like tomatoes.  Aren’t baby plants cute when they first start to look like tiny, tiny versions of themselves?  But my seedstarting setup in the basement, with the grow light, is working really nicely, and we’ve had really good luck so far with germination – we’ve gotten at least one plant in every pot we seeded.

In just a few more weeks, I hope, it’ll be warm enough to plant the tomatoes outside.

What are you planting this year?  Have you gotten any actual food from your garden yet?  (We haven’t – we’re still waiting.)  Or is it still too cold to plant where you are?