Thursday, April 22, 2010

Garden's Up--Cute Baby Plant Pictures

Here's some garden fun.  Baby plants!  Almost as cute as baby animals, but not quite.  I can hear you all ooo-ing and aaaahh-ing already.


Radishes.  The section planted with Hometown Seeds' radishes are doing better than mine as far as germination rate, which I suspected would happen since I don't think my seeds matured enough, but I do have one radish up in my section so far, so my collected seeds are not a total flop.


Spinach.  Yeah, it kind of looks like grass, but it's really spinach's first leaves.


Peas.  These are the peas from the seeds I harvested from the garden last year.  I also planted some pea seeds from 2002 and they are coming up fine.  They were not stored any special way.  In a sack open to the air since 2002.  Pea seeds appear to have quite a long "shelf life".  I planted old pea seeds last year also and had no problem with them.  Most seeds do not last that long in storage.


And raspberries.  Fun stuff.  Just a couple of days ago I planted beets, lettuce, and swiss chard.  I'm not a chard fan, but the kids like it cooked up like spinach with vinegar on it, so I guess if they'll eat it I'll grow it.  If there's too much I might try my hand at dehydrating some and them powder it and put it in something like brownies when nobody is looking.  I've never tried that, but it might work and you know it would be worth a giggle watching my kids and husband eat them. :)

8 comments:

Katidids said...

Never thought of mixing the dehydrated things in! I do that with carrots and green beans tho, just mice it us and mix them in & nones the wiser

Tess P said...

Great pics! I go out every morning to see how my little baby plantlings are. It's always exciting to see how fast they grow.

Bellen said...

Baby swiss chard is great in salads, larger leaves cut in chiffonade work well in spaghetti sauce, omelets, & stir fries. Larger leaves with the rib cut out and sliced like celery sauted with onion & garlic in olive oil then added to the leaves that are cooked with nothing but the water clinging to the leaves makes a great side. Sauteed in olive oil with chopped tomatoes, fresh or canned, and garlic is good too.

Because it grows so well here in FL in both the cool winter and hot summer it is one of my favorite veggies.

marci357 said...

What adorable babies :)

I mix dehydrated veggies in my lasagna sauce or spaghetti squash - started doing it when the kids were little to get extra veggies in - and now my grandkids are none the wiser :)

Love Swiss Chard here in rainy cool coastal Oregon too - Grows year round and is nice to have fresh greens in the winter!
Fav chard way is chopped and sauted with diced bacon and onions... when the bacon and onions are basically done, toss in the chard and flip over a couple times til it wilts a little :) Yum!

Unknown said...

Great pictures of your plant starts. We started ours inside and still afraid it is too cold for outside.

Chef Tess said...

Hooray for baby plants! We just harvested our first spinach ever today along with peas. What a great feeling. I cried. I'm such a baby.

Mr. Pineapple Man said...

I'm starting to grow my tomatoes and I take a pic of it every day. I feel like a mom!

Angela said...

Thanks all for the swiss chard ideas. I'll have to try some and see if it gets better. ;)