Habaneros

When we were picking up the jalapenos, my husband decided he simply had to grow his own habanero pepper. I have no idea what we'll do with them once they grow but we'll do something :p 

Like the other peppers we got at the same time as this one, it's doing well and should be ready to go outside in 2-3 weeks! 

Jalapenos - 3

You will probably notice a very large different between the plants from last time and this time. The ones I posted last time are still hanging on but because the rest of them got eaten, we picked up a 6-pack from a local greenhouse. They were started sooner then ours :p

So, despite this being the third set of pictures... this is the first of this plant. I look forward to seeing it grow and will do better next year with starting my own from seed! :D

Anaheim Chili

Roughly a week ago... my dog at my jalapeno plants. (I was furious.) We decided starting over wasn't going to be feasible with the short season Colorado has and decided to pick up some Jalapeno plants from the local greenhouse.

Clearly, we walked out with more than just jalapenos because here are some anaheims! 

We've had these peppers for 3-4 days, already got them trasnplanted (wanted to avoid the over watering issue the small containers contributed to in our tomato plants) and so far, they are doing really well. All the peppers came in packs of six... so...... 

We're going to have a LOT of peppers lol 

Artichokes

This season, I decided to embark on a grand adventure. We're going to be growing artichokes! They take forever to grow (150-180 days) and will need a very large container... but we love artichokes since they run $3-4 each at the store... $2 on a bag of seeds and seeing what happened couldn't be much more (you know, if you don't count the cost of the containers and soil required LOL).

Like my little frog? :p 

I germinated them using the baggie method, which proved to be really interesting. Unlike last year, where I only germinated cantaloups, cucumbers, lettuce, etc using this method... artichokes take a long time to germinate. It took them at least 14 days before I saw the seeds do anything and from there, they were very slow growing. I actually had to carefully make up a new paper towel with water and a new bag because the other one grew mold. Yuck. :/ Next year I think I may just get a seed heating pad :p

But, we have three sprouts that survived transplant and are growing well so I'm hopeful and excited!!

We started these things at least a month ago and this is all we've got to show for it so far. Come September, we should have some really taste artichokes though! 

Strawberries - 2

This year, we found a second gardening center/greenhouse and bought strawberry plants from both. The first store we went to only had two sets of 6 and 2 weren't doing so well, so when we saw the plants at the greenhouse, we added some of those as well. 

We'll likely go back to the greenhouse and get some more because those plants are doing MUCH better than the ones from the first store. The 2 that weren't doing well died completely and I'm having a much more difficult time strengthening the ones that did. Todays post shows a plant from the greenhouse rather than the gardening center. :)

This plant is doing really well. It's grown a ton, did well after the transplant and I'm hopeful that it will continue doing so :) Along with all the others one we got with it as well. Like with the tomatoes, we figure we'll transplant all the strawberries outside in about 2 - 3 weeks as well. And then just watch them grow!! 

Tomatoes - 2

I'm really excited about this post because I wasn't sure if I'd ever get to make it. After I got my tomato plants, I watered them and they all just started drooping. I wasn't sure if it was because they were to cold in the window or because of to much watering.

I posted in a local group, got a quick answer (it was way to much water) and some additional advice to help my plants out and now we have this: 

That's at least double, maybe even triple, the size the plants were just 6 days ago when I took pictures last. It blew my mind and is the exact reason I wanted to document my plants growth. I hadn't really thought they'd grown much until I took a look at the pictures I'd done before. :)

You probably noticed that my tomato plant is in a small styrafoam cup. Part of the advice I recieved was to transplant the tomatoes into a larger container and farther up closer to the bottom leaves to get them more stability. Boy did it help a ton! I got the cup idea after watching a pepper transplanting video from The Rusty Garden Blog (that guy clearly knows what he's doing so I thought it a trick worth following).

Going by what he said, I should be able to keep my tomatoes in these containers until it's safe to transplant them outside, which is just another 2-3 weeks away! I can't wait. And I'll of course continue to document growth each week until then.

Onion - 2

I've essentially got the same plans for my onions as I do for my garlic but possibly (if I have enough) for fajita mix too that we'll freeze :D 

As you can see, my onion plants didn't like being inside either. I'm not quite sure if it was to much water, not enough sun or what but a couple of them are a little wilty. Hopefully they are enjoying the sun that's out now! 

Garlic - 2

I love garlic. And I am especially looking forward to eating garlic I grew! My plans for this garlic is mostly salsa... but maybe some fresh cooking, ketchup and sauce too! We shall see :D 

Strawberries

Last year, strawberries were the only thing I actually got to eat that I grew... and I think the kids and I shared 2 rather small ones lol - Gardening was a bit of a fail for me last year. I've learned a ton more and am definitely hoping to be more successful this year though.

And to start off, we got 15 strawberry plants!

This one shows the most perfect flower, so I figured I'd share the picture of it. And the one behind it already lost its petals and looks to be on its way to forming into a strawberry :D YAY! :p

Being prego and all, strawberries have been one of my LARGEST craving... and if these plants make it where I can go out, pick a pound of fresh strawberries and eat them all in one sitting I shall be one very happy prego lady :p 

This is another one of the plants and the bud in the middle is taking on the starts of forming into a strawberry. Color me excited :p

I had these plants all inside because of the cold weather (though I'm using todays nicer weather to work on "hardening" all of my plants. I actually took to hand pollinating the flowers to see if we could go ahead and get a start on some actual strawberries! If you look at the bud going towards the bottom that gets cut off, it is also turning into a strawberry.

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And oh lord are they going to be tastey! 

Tomatoes

During the bad weather, we went to the local greenhouse and got 12 Roma tomato plants. They've been in the window seal since... and I'm very new to the tomato world, having never actually grown any before... so these little guys have me worried.

They are just a little droopy. Not all of them but about 1-2 in each set of 4. You'll see what I mean in the picture:

See what I mean. It's just a little... "bendy". I don't know if saying its wilted is exact right description. Others stay up nice and tall though. Definitely color me confused.

I asked in a local group and it was said that perhaps I've been over watering them so I'm going to let them enjoy the sun for several hours today and bring them in and be a little more careful about how much water I give them to see if that helps! :D 

Jalapenos - 2

When I first started working on this photo I figured I'd have to just say that Jalapenos must grow slowly because it looked the same as before... but first I went and looked at my last jalapeno post and there was a good change in growth after all so YAY!

I still think the plant is growing slowly in comparison to other plants I have going but have read that the amount of peppers it gives is plentiful. And I have several jalapeno sprouts going to! At first, I was only going to put some jalapenos in salsa to can for the year... but since I had sprouts going I figured why not get all I can get and pickle them for the year too! Every little bit will save money ;) 

Several of these plants are going to be a little waiting game for me. I had to carefully move them around before the roots all tangled with one another so they'd have space to grow and so they'd be easy to transplant into their own pots later.

To save on money, I figured I'd use pots I already had to get things started. It didn't hit me until last night while watching a The Rusted Garden video that styrafoam cups would make the absolute best and cheapest pots ever until the plants were large enough to go into larger pots.

Live and learn and save money next year ;) lol 

Flowers - 2

It's been a little over a week since my last update. Living in Colorado, I knew it was inevitable but I was hoping this year would skip it anyways.

It snowed. First it got cold. Then it rained. Then it freakin' snowed. None of my plants were killed because we got them all inside when we noticed it getting a bit cooler than normal out... but I can't say they particularly enjoyed being on my kitchen table or in my window either :p

Todays' been the first nice day since the last time I took pictures so, naturally, I had to take pictures! First up are my flowers.

First up are my Sweet Pea flowers. I can't wait to see these beauties grow big and tall! They are doing really well and are fun to watch grow. There is one, it has no leaves and is just growing super tall. You can see it in the back. I also snuck in a seed or two of columbines so it will be fun to see if we get anything from that. I think this is just going to have to be our experimental flower pot haha 

Next up are my Dianthus! 

In my last post, I talked about how this flower pot was mostly my daughter's (she's four) and the seeds didn't get put in any special order, though we tried. This one mostly has the larger flowers and you'll see some smaller ones snuck throughout which are the third type of flower we put in the pot. They are almost like mini versions of the larger Dianthus :p

I'm sure this year, we planted the flowers way to close together and they are obviously mixed throughout but I think when they bloom we will have some truly gorgeous images to share!!! And hopefully we'll find out if we were right about what the smaller flower sprouts are. My guess is Zinnias but we will have to find out eventually! 

My next flower update will also include (hopefully) pictures of the flower pot I got started today which has our Columbines in it! 

Onion

The last thing I have to share today is my onion plants! See, my goal is to grow a garden that will give me the stuff for a salad fresh from the garden and salsa I am able to can and have all year. Couldn't do that last one without some onion!

I planted it before the garlic, so its a good bit bigger. All five have already popped up and seem to be doing really well :) Hopefully I don't end up needing to do any transplanting later on :p

Garlic

This post is particularly exciting because I tried to grow garlic last year. But I tried to grow them in the same pot as green onion. And they look basically the same as they grow and both were seeds. I have no idea which it actually was but this is definitely garlic because I'm growing it from cloves... which is apparently much easier than from seed :p

So far, we planted 5, have 2 doing well above the ground already and one that I'm unsure of. It seems to be a little weaker but it is growing. Hopefully the little guy pulls through. And hopefully the other two pop through before to long :p 

Jalapenos

This post won't show a whole lot... thought it has been the most stressful of what I have growing so far.

The packet said to get the jalapenos growing inside 8-10 weeks before the last frost (which was roughly 2 weeks ago when I planted them). My onion sets came up. Then my garlic came up. Then the flowers came up... but no Jalapeno spouts. I had been putting them outside because the weather here has been so nice! While we're in Colorado, the little town we recently moved to doesn't get near as cold as the cities we had formerly lived in and the temps were already up into the mid 60s and even the early 70s! Outside seemed like the perfect place for the pot to be.

But, the packet said inside and I should have listened (I was bringing them in at night but still). Well, I'd only planted a few seeds and gave the rest to my mother-in-law (MIL) so she could grow some as well. Figuring my seeds didn't take, I got another packet and figured I'd germinate a few inside. I had great success doing this with other plants last year and it was a safe bet.

Then... about 2-3 days ago I went outside, or rather my daughter did, and excitedly gasped that there was green in the otherwise, brown pot! Sure enough, there was a little jalapeno sprout. Since then, the other one has popped up too. Once they get a good bit larger, I'll transplant them into their own pots and have some jalapenos by the end of summer (I hope).

Flowers

Last year, I didn't really grow any flowers. I had a pot of geraniums that I had bought to keep mosquitos away, but other than that... flowers seemed like a waste of my time. That was a bit foolish of me! Particularly since I wasn't growing a large garden! I kept noticing that my strawberries would get flowers and the flowers would die, producing no fruit.

I looked up what could be causing it, learned about hand pollinating fixing the issue and started getting some strawberries... but I figure that having more flowers on the porch may make it a little easier on me ;) So, this year I'm growing several different varieties of flowers!

Pollination isn't the only thing I'm hoping these little flowers will do. My daughter (4) has been compeltely thrilled going out and watching the garden every day and seeing if anything new has come up. Oh, her excitement when the flowers first sprouted! Above, is I believe a Sweet Pea. We planted two different colors of them and they took nearly twice as long to sprout as the other two varieties of flowers we planted so we were very happy when we finally saw them sticking up out of the ground. - This picture was taken roughly 2.5 weeks after we first planted the seeds. 

This next picture shows the other two varieties, one of which I'm not entirely sure what it is because I lost the baggie of seeds... but I'm sure they'll be beautiful whatever they are :p 

I know that the smaller sprouts are Dianthus and I am pretty sure the larger sprouts are a type of Zinnia. Hopefully I find the bag and can confirm. Otherwise, we'll just wait till the grow into flowers and find out then!

When we originally positioned the flowers, the Sweet Peas were to be in the middle, as they would get the largest, then what I think are Zinnias would be around them ending with Dianthuas as they would be the smallest. Since my four year old was helping plant, they didn't get as perfectly situated as one might hope but I think all the colors and the final look will still be beautiful and I know my little girl will be super proud of herself because she's put a lot of work and time into growing these already!

Gardening - 2015

Last year, I didn't completely rock gardening. It isn't that I couldn't get anything to grow... because I did! It's just that by the time they started to grow it was late in the season and I didn't think there would be time for anything to actually produce, so I let it die off with the plans of doing it better next year (which is now - yay!).

I learned a lot last year. I learned that container gardening was the best option for what I wanted to do and where I lived. I learned about the fact that insects don't always magically show up and sometimes you have to hand pollinate... or you can do more to attract insects. I also learned that timing is very important.

That all has translated into what I hope will be a much more succesful garden this summer!

So far, I have my onion sets, garlic, jalapeno and a pot of three different flowers outside and growing in their containers. I have artichokes and more jalapenos germinating in baggies on my window seal and by the end of this month I'll have more flowers planted, the rest of my garden germinating or growing outside! I absolutely can't wait to see how this year goes :D

And, of course, I'll document it all with photos like I did last year :p