Naturally, Growing

We are still flying high after Jacob's good CT results earlier this week. We are also happy to all be back together and are savoring this time as we know it will be short for we have a long 30+ day hospital stay ahead of us. I have some deep thoughts on that and life in general but will save that for another time.

Today my thoughts are on gardening. We finally received some rain which helped the garden plants shoot up (as well as the weeds) so I have been working on tending my vegetables and flowers since arriving home. I realize that after 5 days of being stuck indoors I crave the outside. Things are so much more noticeable when you are deprived of them. The smell of rain and wet pavement, the birds singing, the wind gusting through the leaves on the tree, butterflys fluttering about. I think about people who are just released from prison and how they must marvel once again at everything around them - I'm sure the freedom of the outdoors is more alluring to them then the confinement of indoors. It's a wonderment that I am happy to experience once again...seeing the beauty and blessings in every. little. thing.
Maybe that is why my gardening philosophy has changed this year as well. I've changed my game plan and am curious to see how my experiment will turn out.

With the extremely mild temperatures that we had this past winter I was able to plant quite early, early March as a matter of fact. We've already harvested all of our radishes and turnips. We've been munching on lettuce and spinach for quite some time now. The rhubarb has all but fizzled out.

I had ordered seeds and hoped to start all my plants by seed instead of buying nursery plants. The seeds arrived much too late to start indoors so I decided to go ahead and start my seeds in the ground, even tomato seeds.
I later had some empty space after harvesting the turnips so bought a couple nursery plants. Later I found some self-started tomato plants growing, apparently by a dropped tomato last year. Now that I have nursery plants, seeds started in the ground, and self-sown seeds I am curious to see which do the best this summer. In the first picture you can see the nursery tomatoes (with bush beans behind them), which are big and healthy. Yet, all my nursery plants in prior years tend to wither and die in July so I will be keeping watch on those.

In the second picture you can see tomato wire cages (a couple of which my Grandma used for her tomatoes that my Grandpa had made over 25 years ago! I love having a part of them in my garden!) around teeny tiny tomato plants. Those are the seeds which I planted. I think they will catch up fairly quickly and give us a later harvest of tomatoes. Throughout the garden are a few self-seeded tomato plants which are bigger than the ones I planted from seed and smaller then the nursery plants.

There are also cucumber plants, pepper plants, lettuce, and more. I'll keep you updated on the progress of the plants. Care to take a guess on which plants you think will do the best this year?