GARDEN REPORT

by Robin

I tried to make a deal w/ myself that I would only do garden updates once a month, but I can't seem to stick to that rule. We have so many things in bloom that I had to share them with you.

(I'm going to keep the pics small and you can feel free to click & enlarge the ones you want.)

These are my Sweet Bell Pepper seedling now finally going into bloom. I have a bed of 17 plants that will be mixed colored variety. I put this bed right outside my bedroom window so I can enjoy the colorful view.

I also have approx 15 hot peppers on the end of my viney garden (above). They seem to be a week or so behind the sweet pepper garden. The biggest factor is lack of natural mulch materials.

Here are my tomato seedling that I started in January. They're somewhere between a golfball and baseball in size. We love big tomatoes so much that we didn't feel that 6 plants were enough. I bought a couple more at the store and put them in my main garden.

Big boys are better than Better boys. I love the larger size. Great for slicing on sandwiches or making wedges for salads. Sometimes I have Better boys that tend to mush after ripening. I don't like that. Better boy is a marketing ploy, imo. LOL

VINES

There are a long variety of cucumber (not pickling). They have a great yellow bloom and I believe those are the cukes right behind the bloom. Too cute. This is one you'll want to click on.

Crooked-Neck Squash bloom

The color is truly more magnificient than I could capture. It's somewhere between a canteloupe orange and yellow.

Probably 5 lbs worth of cherry tomatoes from the other day. One picking. I'm giving them away as fast as I can.

I have 3 citrus trees. My grapefruit and tangelo are very mad at me for transplanting them and haven't bloomed. This is my navel babies. See the green ball sitting on the yellow saucer? That's them. The blooms just fell off most of them.

HERBS

Behind the thyme is the sage which doesn't look as healthy as it once did, but it is going into bloom. Maybe the plant is at the end of its life and so it will produce babies soon. I love the delicate purple flower.

Cilantro/ Corriander Forest. All those little seeds that came off the mother plant have created quite the healthy little forest. I will need a serious salsa recipe for canning at some time.

Good size mound of Thyme. This is one of my favorite spices in the garden to cook with. It goes well with everything but my guys tend to eat chicken or fish more than anything else.

Right next to this is the parsley.

Flat-Leaf Italian Parsley - big mound of it, trying to go into bloom.

I still don't cook with this much but I'm trying to incorporate it into mixed herbs that blend with flour for a nice frying crust on porkchops.

TERMITES!

In the back corner of my yard, there is this stump. I had a gorgeous woodpecker attacking it the other day. I figured he was out for ants and maybe termites.

Well, termites *was* it! They started swarming at lunch. The joys of FL living.

Don't miss out on enlarging this one. It is a closeup of the same photo. Each one of those white things is a termite.

(Renee, tell Jim that I need him!) I'm so thankful that they weren't swaming out of a part of my house. That would be terrible!

That's it for now. I'll probably have more garden pics in early May.