“violet queen” cauliflower - april 1, 2010

in southern california, we’re lucky to have excellent weather that lets people garden year-round. where i live, in west hollywood, it’s almost a 365-day growing season. it’s rare that we have a killing frost, so cool-season vegetables like peas, lettuce, radishes, and the like can be grown from basically october to march/april. in all that time, what do i have to show for myself?

HELLA PEAS (for a 2x3 planting. i have a bag in the freezer that i’m going to weigh once the last plant gets ripped out)

SO MUCH LETTUCE OF ALL COLORS (if all = reddish brown to yellowy green)

PURPLE CARROTS AND SOME REGULAR CARROTS TOO

OH MY GOODNESS LOOK AT THE RAINBOW OF RADISHES

i hope to repeat this post in 6 months except with heirloom tomatoes, an embarrassment of basil, too much squash, and the like.

pink cosmo - march 29, 2010

a fancy bug - march 22, 2010

i’m going into my first spring/summer as a gardener! what do i have to show for it?

(carrot sprouts, beets, mature “purple haze” carrots - march 19, 2010)

once the dirt was washed off, you could really see how purple some of these carrots were! (the smaller ones are a different variety - “mignon” nantes (cylindrical, rather than “imperator” conical)

those carrots took like, 4 months, but they were so good. next time i’ll try to be more patient and not thin them out so much. (see also: tiny radishes, tiny beet!)

i sliced up a purple carrot so you can see how deep the purple goes. the answer - not very. but if you sliver it and throw it on salad, it totally looks like fancy candy or something

this is a very small “chiogga” beet. if i had given it another 2 weeks it might have gotten bigger, but it might have just gone to flower - that’s what all the daikon radishes did. this one is sometimes called a bulls-eye beet, and you can kind of see why - the pink rings would have gotten much darker if the beet was older.

picking peas for an hour yields about 1-2 lbs of pods, which equals about this many peas. i’ve been picking peas for about 10 days and i have slightly less than a quart of peas now from about 12 feet of plants? (4 rows, about 3 feet long) next year, way more peas. they are delicious but if i’m going to bother to grow them i should grow a whole lot more.

not pictured: pounds and pounds of lettuce. i kind of quit taking pictures of the lettuce because i’m bringing home more of it than anything else. i went nuts and bought so many kinds of lettuce seeds, but i haven’t even had the space to plant most of them yet. the summer lettuces have gone in and i’m trying to be patient and let those get closer to full-size before i pick them. i’ll remember to get some more pictures next time i pick lettuce - my first heads of romaine are looking pretty much like what you’d buy in the store and it’s all i can do to keep from picking them now!

illuminated borage - march 19, 2010

lupine - march 19, 2010

the garden, day 138 (march 19, 2010)

liezlwashere:

here’s a quick sketch of my buddy, heather.
she’s the proud owner of a plot in a community garden.
I’ve been intending to turn her into a clay figure, but instead I did this.

wow nice! she drew me with a headlamp because i told her i go out and pick peas by flashlght after work every night. i tried to make a headlamp tonight with the headband and bandana. it did not work so well.

borage - march 17, 2010

the first watermelon radish! i gave this to my coworker. i guess you’re actually supposed to grow these at the end of summer (the days lengthening/decreasing spur leafy growth/root growth respectively) but this was pretty big so i picked it out.

charlie said “very radishy”.

the garden, day 136 (march 17, 2010)

i’ve never seen the person who gardens next to me. i’ve met most of my other neighbors, but not this lady (apparently, it’s a lady).

this is the best picture i have of her garden at the beginning. it’s next to mine, which is just bare dirt. it doesn’t look so bad, right? but 4 months later, and it’s almost like there was never anyone there to begin with.

i don’t know if she planted bulbs and forgot to dig them up, or if they just took til spring to sprout?

i didn’t realize you could actually grow tulips here. i thought the ground had to freeze for them to sprout.

fancy!

a springtime daffodil

gorgeous irises

this is the one i’m most curious about. what is it?

edit: not 5 minutes after i posted this, liezl came through! it’s called ranunculus! what a cumbersome name for a pretty plant.