Cauliflower!

Harvested the first of my two cauliflower heads. This one measured about 9 inches across and looks great. I could have waited a bit and seen if it got a little bigger, but I was impatient to have at least some cauliflower.


Here are some Ultimate Opener tomatoes. They look to be doing well. Might have a tomato or two by the 4th of July, which would be great!


Bush beans, flowering.


Here's my tangle of determinate tomatoes. Rutgers on the left, Romas on the right. I pruned a bit and that helped make some sense of the mess. Impossible to see, but there are some blooms in there.


Also spotted a ladybug crawling on my pole beans. Tried to get a picture but it was too blurry. I'm glad to have the help controlling my aphids. They seem to love my swiss chard and my peas. They're leaving everything else alone. I've been using a jet of water to wash them away and that seems to be keeping them at bay.

It's starting to crank up now

Starting to really get some crops going now. Harvested the first batch of sugar snap peas, three heads of lettuce, the first bunch of broccoli and more spinach. My first square of spinach started to bolt, so I quickly harvested the rest of the square and froze it.

Here's a head of buttercrunch and two heads of heirloom iceberg lettuce (including one freakishly large head). Also the first broccoli of the year. (And my daughter's lunchbox.)


My Ultimate Opener tomato plants have some small, marble-sized tomatos on them now. My Mr. Big Peas have lots of pods with peas starting to form inside. One tiny bell pepper, 1/4" in diameter, is hanging from one of my California Wonder plants. So things are really starting to come in now.

Besides all the harvesting and gazing in awe as the plants are starting to take off, I also tied some larger leaves around my cauliflower heads to blanch them. One of them is about the size of my fist and the other is a bit smaller.

Still battling some aphids on a few plants, but a jet of water from my water bottle seems to be keeping them at bay.

Lots of planting!

Did a lot of planting the last few days. Transplanted all my tomatoes (17 total - 7 varieties), basil and the last of the lettuce. Also sowed cilantro, green onions and more carrots. Both the bush beans and pole beans have germinated and are growing fast.

Here's a tour of the boxes...


I'll start harvesting some spinach in the next couple days.




Some leaf lettuce is just about ready for some harvesting as well.


I finished my Self-Watering Containers and planted Roma tomatoes in one and Rutgers tomatoes in the other. The jury is still out for me about these things. They are expensive to make, what with using 2 totes and and 2 cu ft of Miracle Grow Potting Mix, which isn't cheap. In the end, for the cost of making these two, I could have built another 4x4 raised bed filled with Mel's Mix and had more planting area. I'll see how it goes with them this season. It did allow me to plant 4 more tomato plants than I would have otherwise.

Pests!

It finally stopped raining, but now I'm getting hit with some garden pests. My spinach is being hammered by leaf miners. I know the common recommendation is to pull the affected leaves, but my plants are still pretty small. If I pulled the bad leaves, I'd be pulled 50% or more of each plants total. In desperation I hit them with some permethrin -- definitely not the safest insecticide out there, but it was way cheaper than Neem. Besides, I'm still a little ways off from harvesting any spinach. If I can find some cheaper Neem, maybe I'll try it.

Also got a bit trigger happy and killed what I now believe to be a Sac Spider -- a highly beneficial garden predator that eats problem bugs. Oh well. At least I'll know for next time.

I planted my Kentucky Wonder pole beans and my Burpee Stringless bush beans yesterday and transplanted out some more lettuce.

Finally, I realized I started four Rutgers Tomatoes, thinking they were indeterminate, when in fact they are determinate. So now I have no room for them, and will have to buy a few tomato plants at the store to replace them.