Mon Petit Jardin-Le Début

Perhaps using the French language to introduce my very little garden so very early in the game may be a bit misleading.  French is so eloquent and lovely, and my garden, well....it's not quite there just yet.  But, I've been making progress and that deserves a blog post, no?

I've planted some flowers in these pots and the ones in the back pot are doing stupendously.  I have a few little sprouts in the middle pot, and the lavender in the front pot is taking it's sweet old time to do *anything*.  I have one tiny sprout in the pot to the left...*le sigh*.  Once they start taking off a bit better, I'll move them out from under the porch.

 Indeed, this is, so far, a less than lovely garden!  I have just a few things started outside now-the cold weather veggies.  The front line is spinach, which is coming up...hooray!  The middle line is carrots, and I *think* I see some tiny little sproutlets coming through, and the back line is my spring onions...I transplanted those, so they don't really count.

 Look veeeery closely....my spinach!  All those white flecks you see are crushed egg shells for the soil.

 Can I enter another *le sigh*?  My sad but somehow working potato towers.  I found an idea through Pinterest on how to grow potatoes in a tower, so you don't have to dig for them come harvest-time.  I didn't exactly have the same resources the girl did on her tutorial, so I improvised.  They look terrible, but as of today, I'm quite pleased with them!  I bought two of those tomato towers or what-the-devil-uses-to-torment-gardeners towers and attempted for over half an hour to stick the metal rods fully into the ground.  Clearly it wasn't working, so my husband told me to just stick them upside-down...which I did.  I used zip ties to fasten some cardboard to the rims to keep it dark on the inside.  Then I buried the bottom part a little to keep it on the ground.  I put my sprouting potatoes on the bottom, covered them with a little soil and waited for them to grow.  Once I saw some green, I tossed on some dried grass clippings and dried leaves (the girl used hay) to simulate a dark environment and encourage the plant to keep growing UP.  I'll keep doing this until the plants reach the top and then let them do their thing!  The idea is to essentially simulate a dark environment with the (hay) dry grass clippings so the potato tubers will form inside the tower.  It seemed to work for that girl, so I'm crossing my fingers!

 My little pea plants are my pride and joy so far.  They are doing so well, and are such perfect, hardy, cold weather plants.  We have some inside that Marin planted about a month ago and they are already almost 2 feet tall!  If you want to grow something with the kids, peas is the place to start.

 And finally, the tender little seedlings.  I started some peppers and tomatoes and chives inside about a month ago.  The peppers are doing great, the tomatoes...they have got to be the wimpy-est seedling out there, oy vey...making me crazy!  Man-up there little seedlings!  And my chives are nil.  I'll have to try again.  Once they are big enough I'll plant them outside.

I'm hoping to get some strawberry plants in a few weeks to put outside.  I would LOVE to have some strawberry plants, and I had tried to sprout my own seeds, but evidently it's a tricky process...and mine grew mold, so I'll just buy the plant.

Hopefully my little garden will continue to grow and I can share some updates later on!