Garden Update
I’m pretty happy with my little container garden, and lots of tomatoes are starting to appear!

If you saw My First Garden Update from 2013, you know I decided to try container gardening for the first summer at my new house. I’ve had a raised-bed garden for many years, so truthfully I wasn’t sure how a container garden and herbs in the windowsill would fulfill my need to grow things, but truthfully I am loving my small container garden. Most plants are doing well, and the tomatoes especially seem like they’re going to thrive in the containers on the deck. It’s now been more than a month since that first update, so I figured it was time to share how the plants are doing.

By the way, I took these photos at dusk because the deck is too bright to get a good picture during the day, so if you’re wondering how I get my lawn so lush and dark green in Utah where it’s been over 100F for days now, it’s partly a trick of photography! No plants were harmed in the taking of these photos, although I may have snipped off a few leaves to let the tomatoes peek out. Tomorrow is the 4th of July, so after I post this I’m going to take a few days off to celebrate. Happy gardening everyone!

First up in the row of plants is my favorite Green Zebra Tomatoes, and as you can see, they’re doing well. If you’ve never grown this tomato variety, they’re delicious (not to be confused with Striped Zebra, which I don’t like nearly as well.)

New-to-me this year is this Black Krim heirloom tomato, and this plant has the biggest tomato of all so far. I’m really looking forward to tasting this one.

I always grow Celebrity tomatoes, a dependable variety with medium-sized red fruit, and there are a few tomatoes showing up on this one too.

This Pot Black Eggplant is an experiment, but it seems to be getting tons of flowers, and although you can’t see any in the photo, there are a few teeny-tiny eggplants already. This variety produces small eggplants about 3 oz. each.

The basil is thriving on the deck, and when I made Spinach and Basil Pesto I gave it a pretty vigorous trimming. As you can see here, the basil is already growing back with gusto! (Basil loves to be trimmed, and you can freeze the fresh basil to use during the winter.)

My cucumbers don’t seem to be as happy as the other plants, although they’re loaded with blossoms. After I noticed the plants seemed rather yellow, I started fertilizing them once a week with a small dose of Jobes Organic Water Soluble Vegetable and Tomato Fertilizer, which seems to be helping.

The one tomato plant that doesn’t have any tomatoes on it yet is the Lemon Boy yellow tomato but I remember from other years that this plant sets the fruit on late, so I’m not worried.

And I have already eaten one of these tiny little Sun Gold Yellow Cherry Tomatoes, which was delicious!

Meanwhile, in the kitchen window the basil is not so happy, and if you look carefully you can see that the plant is infected with some kind of little bug. They aren’t eating the leaves, and I’ve been putting the two basil plants in the sink every day and spraying them with water, which seems to be helping. I might buy a couple more basil plants while the garden center still has them, because I really want basil growing in my window!

The rosemary is thriving in the sunny south window. I love rosemary, especially in winter cooking, so I’m hoping I can keep it going all winter.

I originally had cilantro in these next two pots, but I realized that you use so much of it at a time that it took the whole pot to make a dish and then it took forever to grow back. So I ditched the cilantro and planted Greek oregano in this first one. It’s very happy here.

On the other pot that first had cilantro I planted Thyme, which is another herb I love for winter cooking.

The mint has been trimmed many times, and as you can see it grows back nicely. Mint will grow anywhere, so no surprise it’s happy in this window.

Flat parsley seems to grow back more slowly than the curly parsley, but it’s doing pretty well in the window as well.

And the curly parsley is thriving, and I love parsley so I am so happy to have it growing in my kitchen!

You can see all my garden updates through the years by using Garden Updates.

If you’re growing vegetables and herbs, either in containers or in a regular garden, please share in the comments about what you have growing and how your plants are doing.

Blogger Disclosures:

Most of the links in this post are merely to give information about that type of plant, and are not necessarily an endorsement of that supplier or website. If I link to a product that I use myself, it’s because I like that product and would buy it again.

 

Share This: