Planting complete...for now

In spite of the pollen trying to kill me, I finally finished planting my vegetable beds over the past two weekends.

Left to right: tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, asparagus

The first weekend, all I had the energy for was to plant one lone zucchini plant (it's there next to the strawberry plant in front of the beans). I fortified my defenses against the allergies and planted the bell pepper plants a few days later. This past weekend I planted the tomatoes and two more rows of beans.

By the way, I know the wood around our raised beds is kind of falling apart, please don't judge. We had grand plans to redo them and make them sturdier this year, but that was before we had to limit our shopping trips and stay home due to a pandemic. So this year's motto is reuse and make do. The plants don't mind and still grow just fine.

The potatoes I planted in the ground finally got tall enough for me to cover them up--which meant I could move the pile of dirt back into the potato row, making room to plant the tomatoes.

The potatoes had gotten quite weedy--I must have established my beds at the perfect time for all that weed grass seed to sprout--but it was okay since I was going to be piling six inches of soil on top of the weeds. Potatoes live, weeds die. Problem solved!

I planted two varieties of tomatoes. I kind of lost my mind when I went plant shopping this year. I planted two of a cherry tomato variety called 'Sweet Million' that I've pretty sure I've grown in the past. The upside of cherry tomatoes is that they're very prolific and seem to get very few diseases or pests. The downside is that the plants get HUGE. If you had something tall enough for them to climb, they would get nine feet tall. I planted them on the ends of the row so they would have more room to spread out, and planted two 'Cherokee Purple' tomatoes in between. The upside of Cherokee Purple tomatoes (an heirloom variety) is that they are DELICIOUS. I love all fresh tomatoes, but Cherokee Purple is probably my current favorite for flavor. The downside is that they tend to get diseases and insects in my garden, so I don't get to harvest very many. Hopefully the two varieties will balance each other out.

My beans sprouted this past week! They like all the rain we've been getting. It's easy to tell the two varieties apart--the purple bush beans, 'Royal Burgundy', have purple stems, while the yellow bush bean plants are completely green.

The radishes are getting bigger! They've graduated from little tiny seedlings to have real leaves. So far, so good.

I picked my first strawberry of spring. It was tiny but full of flavor!

One flower coming into bloom this week: my 'Sunset Cutie' gaillardia that I planted last spring. This perennial seems to bloom all the way from April to December here in Georgia. It's drought tolerant and attracts butterflies, so it's a winner in my garden.