Winter Planting 2021

My summer garden produced two lovely pie pumpkins, one eggplant slightly larger than my fist, three pickling cucumbers, and so much regrown celery that I'm using it for mulch.  I also got a regrown leek and a full bunch of regrown green onions.

I'm hoping this winter's garden is more bountiful.  Seeing that I seem to be better at growing kitchen scraps than anything else, I started regrowing more green onions.  A sprouted garlic went in a large planter pot, surrounded by radish seeds.  My hope is that subsequent sprouted cloves will join it, because there is always green garlic by the time I finish a head.

I haven't bought dirt in a couple of years, and everything was looking low.  It took three bags to get close to where I wanted my planters to be, plus filling a few herb pots.

I went herb shopping, since they're so hard to establish.  4" pots were $6!  And they didn't look that great.  The Thai basil was already flowering, and no one had tarragon.  Fine, I bought some seeds.  Made a pot each of chives and Mexican tarragon (because it's more heat resistant than French), and two pots of cilantro because I had just bought some at the market and hated the price.

For the lettuce patch, I had the hybrid Romaine and spinach seeds from last year.  Didn't realize I was out of arugula seeds and had to go back to the garden store.  There was one eggplant taking up that space anyway.  While I was there, picked up some Italian parsley seeds, despite how hard it is to germinate parsley.  Again, I was weighing how much it costs at the market versus attempting to grow from seed.

For the Pond, I had the problem of eggplant that wasn't quite done.  I didn't want to rip out two plants that were flowering, even though neither had produced squat in six months.  I seeded around them with carrots, beets, and peas, assuming the eggplant will die before any of them are established.

That left one sizable pot with the last eggplant, the only one that had fruited.  I'm planning to use it for carrots, which can wait a few weeks because I had already seeded the Pond.  The eggplant has a little longer to prove itself.

So this is still a work in progress, but I know what I'm planting and where everything will go.  Nightshade season just refuses to end.  Won't be a problem next year, since you shouldn't plant them two years in a row in a given planter and I ended up putting at least one in all of them.  Didn't think that one through.