Greenhouse Plants, Etc.

Last week, when I took these pictures (I know, I'm lazy), our garden turned 4 months old. It has provided us with many peas, arugula, mustard, and spinach. Actually, it was a lot more arugula and mustard than we could handle, so we took them out. Plus, they had tons of aphids. It was neat to see some biological control agents coming to the rescue - ladybugs, parasitoid wasps - but I took them all out. We really didn't know what to do with all that mustard, and the arugula, when not young and tender, is too strong for my taste. We also had arugula and mustard, as well as endive in the mesclun salad mix, so we took them all out, finding little lettuce plants struggling for some air and light. Well, they have plenty of both now!


The area between the struggling lettuce and the green onions, where the arugula and mustard were, now features little lettuce babies, planted 2 weeks earlier:


The greenhouse plants are doing pretty well too:

Four artichokes, 8 bell peppers, 2 eggplants, and the rest are various varieties of heirloom tomatoes.


Even though we didn't really have any below-freezing days since I built the greenhouse, I like to believe that the greenhouse helped these plants grow. As I mentioned before, these pictures were taken last week, and now they are even bigger. Plus, we also purchased another pepper plant and a thyme plant from the Tucson Organic Gardeners Sale last Sunday. As you can see, some of the seeds didn't sprout - 2 of our Taos tomatoes and 3 of the bell peppers. We resowed them yesterday. We also removed most of the doubles and triples to leave a single seedling. The recommendation is to transplant them sometime between mid to end March. I think we will wait until they're a bit bigger to do that, though 2 of their beds have been ready months ago.

Yesterday we dug another little bed for some more herbs we are planning to grow: mint, thyme, lemon verbena, and anything else that will strike out fancy.

If you are interested in spinach, parsley or cilantro, let me know - we have way too much!