Plants Glorious Plants

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and I thought I'd share an update on all those plants I started in mid-March. There have been a few failures, but there's also a decent amount of success for my first time starting things from seeds and transitioning them outside. 

Here's the spread outside, all placed in a little clump right now. There was a nasty thunderstorm earlier this week and I moved all the plants under the eaves of the house to the best of my ability. They still got really swamped, but they're all still standing!

Here's the tomatoes. There are nine of them right now, all moved to their own pots last week. They really perked up without the intraspecific competition, but now I need bigger pots rather quickly, and trellises.

The zucchini! These have been my biggest failure in my opinion, as I started with 18 sprouts and now only have 4 plants. But these four look great, and they each have about a dozen buds on them already.

The broccoli, which I'm probably most excited and most worried about. Their stalks are very thin, and they took the worst beating in the storm. When I got up in the morning, half of them were entirely underwater, which I tried to dump, but their soil is still very compacted. All five of them are still alive though, so maybe they're hardier than I think.

This might look funny, but I'm also keeping dandelions in a few pots as food for my lizard. Ironically, these were the only pots I needed to weed today.

Here's a (really bad) picture of the only two houseplants I keep. The jade plant is from the historic house I worked at in California, and the purple guy is from the Beloit College greenhouse. Parts of that plant live in five states that I know of off the top of my head (Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, California, and I think Virginia). They're happy to be outside after the winter.

Inside, I still have a few little guys in pots, just upgraded today from their seedling trays. I have seven pots of basil, probably 4-5 plants in each pot. There will be delicious pasta dishes all summer long.

You can't see these very well as they're still the smallest in my little green menagerie, but on the right are a few lavender seedlings and on the left are sensitive plants. I wasn't sure about transplanting the lavender, it's grown so slowly, and I'm not very confident about them making it to bloom. The sensitive plants are looking pretty good, but haven't grown much in the last few weeks. I'm planning to bring a few to work for kids to poke at, and I'll keep 2-3 for myself.

The husband brought home a couple of plants for me a few days ago too! It was funny, I rubbed the leaves first to smell before reading the labels. This one confused the heck out of me, and it turned out it's a Pineapple Sage, which indeed smells like the fruit.

This one's a more normal rosemary, but will still be delicious on meat this summer. I need to get both of these into new pots soon, which will mean a trip to the store. 

That's my plant update for this week! I'll keep taking photos as they grow, and hopefully bloom and fruit!