Our Garden

For the past few years, I have been growing 2-3 pots of vegetables (tomatoes and peppers that Zach's grandmother starts from seedlings each year), and we continued the tradition this year, too! We started some plants from seeds, and others we bought from a nursery. Here's an update so you can see what green thumbs we have.

These are 2 little pots of hot peppers that we started from seeds. They grow slowly, but they're really cute. Their home is on a windowsill in the kitchen. This seems to be perfect because they like the sun, just not the heat that comes with the California sun.

These 2 tomatoes were also started from seeds. They are called "sweet tomato hybrid." They are indeterminate tomatoes, meaning that the plant creates a vine, up to ten feet tall. They flower and produce fruit all season until killed by frost (or squirrels). These two plants haven't started blooming yet, but hopefully soon they will! They are growing so fast. We planted them at the same time we planted the peppers above, can you believe that?!

Next is our basil plant that we bought from Trader Joe's in August when Zach moved to Pasadena. We transplanted it to a bigger pot in January. Since then, it goes through phases of doing well, then not so much. It turns out, the basil does best when we water it very little, and we keep it next to a window instead of in direct sunlight, and it seems to like that. We have made pesto many times, and threw some chopped leaves in spaghetti sauce and other dishes.

Oooh, our lettuce. Also grown from seed, it's growing like a weed! It's a "looseleaf type" (whatever that means) that we found at Target. It also sits in a windowsill, and is growing so quickly!

It's hard to tell in the picture below, but there are 2 pepper plants in that pot. Both plants we got at Whole Foods for 99 cents each when they were about 4 inches tall. Since then, they have flowered and started producing a ton of fruit! Each plant has about 6 peppers on it.

This pepper below is the biggest one!

This tomato plant was also purchased at Whole Foods. It is also indeterminate, and has grown so fast that Zach tied some rope to our roof for the vine to grow up on. We have to pick "suckers" each week off of the vine. "Suckers" are shoots that develop from the main vine and branch. Pruning the plant keeps it less enormous and the fruits on the vine will be bigger than if we left the suckers on. Zach did a lot of research on the plants to figure out how to grow them well, and the tomato is succeeding as a result.

[Not pictured: cilantro. The camera wouldn't focus the leaves very well. We only have about 8 cilantro leaves started from seeds, it's not that impressive, and it's sort of dying. This is unfortunate, though, because we use so much cilantro in our Mexican dishes. I think we will eventually buy a started cilantro plant from a nursery, though, and it will be more fun!]

We water our outdoor plants daily because it gets so warm here during the day. Hopefully, when it gets hotter in the summer, all of our plants will continue to do well. Zach and I look at them daily (we're so proud of them!), so we'll be able to catch them if they get droopy or start to look funny. We will definitely post updates as the summer goes on about our garden!

Anyone else gardening this summer?