And…Vegetables

My perennial bed is doing great. Things are popping up and filling out everywhere. It’s green. It’s vibrant.

And then there’s the vegetable side: So, let’s start where we left off back in March. I got a bunch of my vegetables started nice and early in a greenhouse. By the beginning of April, the tomatoes were a good twelve inches tall and nice and healthy. Warm weather came, and I got a call from one of the other people using the greenhouse. It was getting too warm and he recommended I get my plants out soon. As soon as I could, I brought them home and popped them in my freshly dug vegetable patch.

My usual plan has been to keep my newly transplanted tomatoes and peppers under milk jugs to keep the starlings from snapping them off, but this time they were way too big for that. I got them in the ground and things looked pretty good…

…until a few days later when it was obvious that they were in shock. I think in other years, I’d inadvertently been easing them through the transition with the milk jugs’ protection.

I got advice on dealing with plant shock from a friend who got this advice from a barber who’d just given her a horrible haircut by scalping the sides of her head: tomatoes and hair are the same. They both go through root shock but in about two weeks they get over it and they look great.

I’m not sure about the bad haircut or the guy’s advice, but I’m past the two week mark and the plants are looking better.

Meanwhile, John and I have made several good meals from my spring garden. The collards that overwintered became part of a homemade pasta dish on John’s birthday, he’s been adding the collard leaves to his breakfast smoothies, and last week I made a pizza topped with baby collards, spinach, and feta with a little red onion. There’s also a whole salad-worth of lettuce waiting for us to turn it into something good.

This year I’m continuing with the container garden on the big concrete section of our back yard. The containers do a lot to expand my vegetable space. The actual vegetable garden is only about 10 feet wide at its widest and about 25 feet long. A friend recently referred to it as a “garden-ette”. A week after transplanting the tomatoes and peppers, I transplanted cucumbers, squash, and a melon in the containers.

I’ve also added my newest garden markers that were created and sold by the kids in Art & Company at Patchwork. They’re awesomely odd. I love the extra art on the tomato one…

I like the color of the one that said kale so much that I decided to mislabel my collards just so I could use it.

And I got the chives one just because it says: “plants. yum.” I decided garlic was close enough to being chives.

Meanwhile, last week was warm and sunny–perfect for running errands around town while using my super cute vintage bike. Faux vintage bikes seem to be really cool right now, but I think the design of the real thing is hard to beat. And you can’t top these sparkly purple handlebar grips and streamers! I looked up my bike’s serial number and found that it is a Schwinn Hollywood built in Chicago in May, 1968. That makes it exactly 45 this month!