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!