Home Garden Update

I was wondering today just how long my little garden has been growing for. Looking at my Flickr set, it looks like I had moved a few of the tomato seedlings outside on May 22nd. Here’s a shot at the time:

I took a few photos today, and wanted to do a little comparison. It’s been roughly five weeks since I started, and here’s what things look like today:

As you can see, things are progressing nicely. I had a little mishap about a week ago where I accidentally broke the main stem on one of my roma tomato plants. I actually managed to fix it up such that the wilting disappeared and it started coming back to life. Unfortunately that made God angry, and he destroyed that little guy with some wind instead. So I lost half of that tomato plant. Thankfully I planted a few extra (the engineer in me, always have a backup people), so I should be ok for the season.

A few other of my plants took a pretty big beating during that little wind storm, so I decided that it was probably a good time to stake most of the bigger plants. I went down to Canadian Tire and bought some bamboo sticks along with some velcro tape and spent about 30 minutes yesterday staking all the main stems on the larger plants. So I think they’ll handle the elements a little bit better.

I planted a pile of lettuce back in May, but I think I screwed up and planted them all too close together. The end result is that the lettuce is growing really slow (or possibly not really growing at all anymore), which is surprising since it’s supposed to grow rather quickly. One stray lettuce plant somehow managed to end up in another pot, and it is almost at full size now, leading me to believe that I planted the lettuce a little too densely. So, I’m starting over (since lettuce can basically grow year round), and doing a proper lettuce planting using Romaine and a green leaf lettuce.

Strangely enough, I’m actually getting a lot of enjoyment out of my little patio garden. I sometimes find myself just sitting outside with a coffee and staring at my plants. My only real regret is that I don’t really have enough room to grow anything else (which sort of makes me want to start thinking about investing in a house).

The good news is that most of the plants have started to flower. My pepper plants have also started to produce peppers, which has been rather cool to watch. Here’s a shot of a little red pepper starting to grow in one of the flowers:

I’m not really sure how long it’s going to take for the tomatos to grow at this point. Most of the tomato plants I have are determinate, and they’ve pretty much all flowered at this point. So I’m hoping I’m only four to six weeks away from making my first batch of pico de gallo using fresh ingredients. So exciting.