Garden #3: Growing and first fruits

So far so good on actually doing some semi-regular blog posts.  Full disclosure - this entire post is about plants, gardening, and watching stuff grow.  If that's not your particular cup of tea feel free and skim, but you should also give it a shot, it's deceptively and fascinatingly interesting (plus there's some great photos).  There are also a few great shots of Liam and Kristen in here, too.

Last time around we had just seen all the plants safely planted in the garden and getting happy.  Here's a shot of the group one week after that:

These are some tomatoes on our "Early Girl" variety right about this time (4/22).  As you can see they're still very green, but you'll be amazed how fast they get color.

I had gotten out my nice Canon to take these and some other photos, and I grabbed some fantastic ones of Liam, too.

I also got a few great ones of Kristen and Liam together.  Here they're both doing Liam's trademark smile:

And this one is just photo gold:

About a week later (4/28), we found our first squash blossom!  I also found out an interesting fact about squash (and zucchini) blossoms - they open for an hour or two in the mornings, then close back up, and then keep repeating that every day for 1-2 weeks before they dry up and fall off.  Fascinating!

Another shot of the Early Girl tomatoes - it's only been 6 days and those first ones are already starting to get some color.

The cucumber also started to put out little feelers - this one found the nylon trellis and wrapped around it all on its own, we didn't have to train it at all.  Pretty amazing.

Only two days later (4/30) and the Early Girl tomatoes are a strong orange-red.  Liam was so excited, we kept telling him that we couldn't pick any of the tomatoes until they turned red - when he saw these he got ecstatic (even though they still aren't quite ready).

Here's another round of top views to show the growth.  These are from 5/1, just 11 days after the photos at the top of this post.  Pretty astounding how fast this stuff grew, especially the squash and zucchini (squash are top left and bottom center, zucchini are top right and middle right)

Our tomatoes are starting to look like an impenetrable tomato forest.  The square foot gardening book recommended this tight of planting, but I think next time we'll space them out a bit so they can breathe.  Doing great though.

We also saw the first good looking squash of the season!  I managed to get out at the right time of the morning to get the blossoms open as well.

 

On the weekend a few days later I broke out my nice Canon and took a ton of photos of everything - I'll only inflict a few on you here.  These are some of the cherry tomatoes we have going - I absolutely love how they grow in a little array, so nice and neat.  The engineer in me can't help but appreciate and love that design.

Also another example of the cucumber tendrils grabbing the nylon trellis - again completely on its own, no training at all.  Just amazing.

And those first Early Girl tomatoes are looking delicious!  They looked so good, in fact, that I told Liam we could pick them.

 
He was absolutely thrilled!  He got so excited about them, just held them, checked them out, and carried them around for the next 30 minutes.  These are just a few of my favorites during this time.

I jumped the gun on these just slightly - once we cut them open there was a tiny green spot in the middle, but we ate them anyways (as part of a caprese salad, yum).  They were unbelievably divine.  The closest I can come to describing the taste is that it was fuller in every sense than any store bought tomato - eating them side by side just made the store bought ones taste washed out.  I know you gardeners out there know this already, and maybe my taste buds were biased since I knew we grew these ourselves, but they really were amazing.

We're getting pretty close to being able to harvest our first squash I think.  I can't wait until we have enough to fill baskets!  More to come...