Sprouting

Not my photo, and far more enthusiastic sprouts than I have right now.

Guys, gardening is hard.

Not that I didn’t know that, but this weekend has been a weekend full of sun and warm weather and I’m hoping, really hoping, that some of our little green shoots will turn into something recognizable. So far, here’s what we’ve got:

Potato barrel: two tiny little green nubs are sticking a bit out of the soil, which gives me hope for the rest of the little guys. When we have a full leafy carpet in there, we’ll add more potato slips, more dirt, and let them all just keep growing up in layers all season. At the end of the summer, you dump the barrel and pull out the potatoes… in theory. This is new for us.

Carrots: We have planted the wimpy little wisps I started indoors, and I’m hoping the high temperatures and sunlight will bring out the best in them.

Lettuce: Our first batch of lettuce and spinach languished under the snow flurries of last weekend, so we’ve planted seeds directly into our boxes for these and are hoping for the best. Only a few sad sprouts survived the cold so we’re hoping to see them pep up.

Tomatoes and Peppers: We’ve started the seeds, but they only get to stay out overnight when it doesn’t get below 50… we don’t want to shock them this early in the season.

Squash: This is a summer crop, but we’ve had such large and happy seedlings (and we really didn’t want this many squash vines… gulp) that we went ahead and planted four of them just to see what happens. The others will hang out with the tomatoes and peppers till fear of frost is gone.

I am mouth watery about making salads with fresh picked greens, dipping crisp peppers into hummus, blending my own tomato sauces to save for the winter, eating gallons of butternut squash soup… but I am SERIOUSLY ahead of myself. For today, I have got to hope these little guys can get out of the ground. We’ve also got a bucket planter filled with herbs, but they haven’t sprouted at all in a week… so we’re a little worried.

Projects like gardening put into stark contrast the difference in project style between Husband and I: I like to plan everything out and then make small tweaks to the plan; he is far more happy just deciding to do something today and laughing about it if it dies tomorrow. He knows a lot more about gardening than I do, but I think we both fall into the realm of novices at this point, at least in this new place where we’ve never gardened before. We’re getting used to each other’s rhythms, though a lack of communication at one point this weekend caused us to each plant seeds in the same square of our planting box; we’ll just have to see whose seeds actually win!

I’ll be back in a couple of days with more recipes; working through a backlog of cooked but not written-up recipes. Enjoy the sunshine, if you have it where you are.