Spring fever

With the advent of spring (albeit a cool one), my energies have turned toward gardening, so I have decided to enlarge the scope of this blog to include plants as well as fibers.  Here are some photos of my garden projects!

The season began with some seedlings started on the sun porch.  I am the Dr. Frankenstein of lettuce, submitting them to all sorts of experiments.  First I thought I'd start some in a big pot on the sun porch and see if they would transplant out later on.  Here's my sun porch growing area:

You can see the lettuce in the big blue-bottom pot.  The medium pots have summer savory (seeds not sprouted yet) and a small holly tree we overwintered in the house.  The small pots have more tiny lettuce seedlings and basil (on the left, not sprouted yet). 

Some of the lettuce I transplanted to my garden beds.  The rest I left in the pot for comparison, and to see whether I could grow it to maturity on the sun porch.  It survived the transplanting without any problem, but it did slow them down considerably.  Here are a few of them:

In time, I'm sure they will be yummy.  I also direct seeded some lettuce into the bed as well as some more indoors, we'll see which ones do better.  See?  Experimental.

At one end of one box I planted snow peas, sown directly outdoors:

And finally, I now have almost all the roots planted in the other box.  There's parsnips, beets, and turnips, carrots still to go in, and also a row of kohlrabi.  Just planted all that this week, so no sprouts yet.  But you can see what my garden boxes look like.  I have two of them this year:

They're 8' x 4'.

I also have okra and eggplant seedlings starting in the kitchen.  Didn't do them on the sun porch because they need warmer temperatures, and it has just been too cool and cloudy for the sun porch to be reliably warm.  The okra take a long time to come up, but they're coming up like crazy now (after 3-4 weeks).  The eggplant have not come up well, I think I overwatered them.  I can see some kind of mildew on the soil.  Oops.

But it's fun, and I am accomplishing my  main goal of spending more time outside when the weather is nice.  I mean really, I always stand there at the end of summer wishing I'd spent more time just enjoying the great outdoors.  But just sitting out there isn't satisfying.  I need something to do, so...a garden!