My garden amazes me daily.  This past weekend we dipped very close to freezing, and it was quite cold over the weekend.  And yet… my garden is thriving.  I swear my plants actually liked the cool weather and the rain that came with it!  Let’s check out some incredible changes, shall we?

The herbs are doing well on the deck.  The dill has been expanding every day!

I love that large rosemary plant.  That was a steal of a find at the Minneapolis farmer’s market for only $5.00.  Sadly, I lost my parsley.  I forgot to punch holes in the bottom of the tray I’d started the seeds in, and a rainy weekend while we were away drowned every last one of them.  I’ll figure out a replacement soon.

The pepper patch is hanging in there.

Every single pepper I planted is thriving.  Most of them are here in this patch, but I also have a dozen of them planted in buckets as well.  It should be a great year for peppers!  The last two days have brought me some incredible surprises:

That is a Cherry Bomb pepper growing!  Next door to the cherry bomb my Purple Jalapeno is also sporting two baby peppers and a whole handful of blossoms.  He didn’t cooperate for a picture.  But this pepper plant did:

That is one of my Feher Ohon Paprika plants.  Both plants have baby peppers, as well as my Yellow Cheese Pimento plant.   It’s absolutely amazing to see so early in the year!  We’ll be enjoying our first tastes of peppers very soon, I think.

Let’s move into the garden a bit.  Here is a shot of one of the beds in the back.

I have lettuces planted along the back, and carrots in the two feet in front.  The carrots took forever to spring up, but now they are there, and it looks like I’ll get a nice harvest there this year.  Some of the lettuces either haven’t come up, or were scattered by critters.  I’ll replant a few in the next day or two, I think.

Here is the other back bed.

Again, I have lettuces planted in the back.  The Mizuna popped right up, as did one of the mesclun mixes, but the other lettuces are slow going.  The spinach and beets are doing well though!  The snap peas on the end continue to do their thing as well.

Here is the eggplant bed:

My big note for next year is that eggplants do NOT like being out in the garden in the cool spring weather.  They’re all still there, but they’re not doing very well.  Next year I will start them later than everything else, so that they get planted out mid-June, I think.  To the left of the eggplants in this bed I planted five varieties of cucumber today.  To the right of the eggplants I have four small basil plants, and today I also added a few lettuce seeds to maximize the space.  Again, snap peas on the end of this bed.

This next bed has six more varieties of cucumber planted at the back of it.

Yesterday I harvested some radishes for the first time, and I noticed today that my other variety of radish is looking good, so I’ll pluck those out for Andy tomorrow.  You can see my scallions are doing nicely, though the collard green plant is providing them with a bit too much shade.  The collard green may come out.  I think I don’t care for it, but I have one more thing to try with it before I have a solid verdict.  The rest of the brassicas are doing well there.  The kale plants are vibrant and healthy, and the broccoli and cauliflower seem happy as well.

At the bottom of that last picture you can see my bed with the Swiss Chard in it.  That bed’s been at a standstill for a bit.  I suspect rabbits dined on the Chard before I fortified the fencing.  The bare patch in that bed is where I planted three varieties of bush beans yesterday.

Check out this tomato plant!

Color me surprised when I walked out yesterday and found that my Sun Sugar plant already had blossoms on it!  Kind of hard to see in the picture, but it’s the second plant from the right at the top.   The tomatoes have been put through the wringer with excessive wind, rain and cold, but they have proved their resilience this year by hanging in there.

And one more picture of the bonus potato patch.  Check out what’s going on there!

I have potato leaves!  They’re coming up nicely from the rotting potatoes I tucked in the dirt.  We’ll see if we get a potato harvest this year.  The other day I also planted bush beans on either side of the potatoes- I think they’ll be a decent companion crop for each other.

I think tomorrow I have to spend time over at The Sunset Garden pulling weeds and putting up a few more trellises for the tomatoes over there.  I’ve lost a few over there, but overall I’m pleased with how things are going.  Hopefully all the cold weather is now behind us and we have no more dangers of frost in the mix.