Maybe it could have waited another day, but I was convinced that I had never seen a prettier or tastier-looking strawberry in my life. I picked it like the internet told me to - pinching the stem above the strawberry and letting it roll into my hand - and I felt proud. This strawberry made it with my help!
Ok, I need to work on my indoor food pictures. But. It was so perfect! There were a few markings at the base of the strawberry, but nothing too major. I sliced it into quarters and brought each of my roommates a piece (after I ate mine, of course). The general consensus was that it definitely tasted like a strawberry, but it wasn't the BEST strawberry ever. But definitely still tasty!
Since today was the first day I had free since turning in the official 1st draft of my final paper yesterday (!!), I spent the early afternoon researching supplies I wanted to get from Armstrong (since I had a groupon for that particular garden store). There was certainly more on my list than I ended up getting, but here is the bounty, pre-planting:
In order from the top down: zucchini, orange bell peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes! Note the bag of potting soil and vermiculite to the left. My garden book recommended a mix of 4:1 potting soil to vermiculite, so I ended up sprinkling a layer of vermiculite every so often when I was filling the pots up. Hopefully it'll help my plants grow! It's supposed to help water-retention, which should be useful for potted plants (since they dry out more quickly than plants in the ground). Here is the rest of the purchase:
Here we have: swiss chard and lettuce in the rectangular planter and bush beans below. Beyond getting a bunch of plants, I also bought a few tools (which I used a TON): a little hand rake and a trowel. I was tempted to grab my backpacking trowel, but I decided I could stand having two. I also ended up with a few little terracotta pots for... we shall see. Maybe planting more onions, but maybe getting a handle on the craziness that my succulent garden has become.
After a few hours of weeding and planting, I have what looks like a garden!
Left to right, top to bottom: swiss chard, lettuce, bush beans, tomatoes (yellow pear), orange bell peppers, bush beans, zucchini, cucumbers (lemon, they'll be little and yellow, aww), and green onions in the bottom row. I replanted a bunch of them 2.5" apart, but still have about a million left and no pots to put them in - I'm considering going door to door trying to hand them out, but I am also interested in finding random places to plant them. In the front yard? In a patch of ground somewhere in a street median? We shall see! But for now, I am just so excited to have all of these in the ground and growing. Tomorrow I won't be gardening, but my next task is to do some succulent control and to figure out where to put my new snake plant!
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