bluesgarden | Pics: Pre-Planting Growing Status

At the end of the driveway, we have a panel with the electric meter and what not. On top of one of the posts, beneath the dubious shelter of some coated wire (from the clothesline) and a post hole digger, a robin has built a nest and is sitting on a single, blue egg. D parks directly in front of this spot, which doesn't seem to bother mama robin any more than me walking past to hang laundry on the line. There was no need to use a zoom lens for this picture. :)

I'll link these two so as not to squick anyone wigged out by small insect type creatures: The ants are having a housing crisis with all the rain this spring. I keep disrupting them unintentionally in the greenhouse.

The Cinnamon basil is showing a greater variety of phenotypes than I might expect. I prefer this one as it's not tall and leggy, and has a good leaf size. Not to mention the dark green and purple of the leaves.

The Genovese basil is doing better than the Italian Large Leaf. The Italian initially showed some sunburn on the leaves (I think, but considering how the last 'sunburn' turned out to be a fungus, I'm keeping an eye on them). They're putting on newer leaves that look better, but the Genovese is overall healthier and ahead of the game.

The Russian kale is looking promising.

The Red choi and Da Cheong Chae next to the front greenhouse door are bolting and therefore will be harvested tomorrow.

The kohlrabi out front are sizing up! I'll wait until they're about baseball size to harvest.

Their greens are gorgeous.

Meanwhile, the snow peas have put on quite a few flowers, but the bottom of the plant collective is starting to suffer from what appears to be some kind of root rot, which is yellowing leaves from the bottom up. I should be able to get a few peas out of it still. Even if they were perfectly healthy, they would be succumbing to the heat fairly soon anyway, so I'm not too alarmed, particularly considering the way spring has progressed! I definitely learned some things to apply to next year.

Inside the greenhouse, the onion plants are looking lovely! It's a good thing there's a lot of them, though, considering time lost for sizing up. The resulting onions may be smaller than they would be otherwise.

The leeks are considerably more scrawny, but I tried thinning them out by snipping the extras out of each cell. The extras grew back. Tenacious little bastards.

The peppers are doing pretty lousy, actually. This is one of the healthier ones, although it too should be a good bit taller by now. An impromptu trip with MiL to a nearby (small) greenhouse today led to me picking up a 4-pack of Chocolate Beauty peppers since that's one of the varieties I have and I've been seriously wondering if mine would make it. One of the Buran peppers only has a single leaf!

The pumpkins need to be moved before they start getting ideas about just setting up shop where they are. Digging some of the holes for transplanting into the garden this year is going to be like digging a hole to transplant a tree.

The Firecracker sunflowers are, um, a wee bit impatient. It looks like I'm just going to plant the sunflowers in the back half of the garden this year and I'll worry about prepping a new bed around the pup's pen over the summer so it's ready for next year.

The tomatoes look fantastic! Particularly considering I thought they were goners just two weeks ago! They're tall and strong - only two have had supports added at this point - and I'm pretty excited to see how they do in the garden this year!

The heat and sunlight have them putting on greenery.

Meanwhile, the Velvet Red lives up to it's name with soft, silvery foliage.

I've had to expand their space and move the taller specimens on the other side of the aisle. Fortunately, they should be out in the dirt by Monday, which will be in the nick of time or I'd have to be re-potting them again.

So there you have it. It looks like we're going to get at least a bit of a shower but the harder weather is swinging to the south (not that I've been obsessively checking the weather radar or anything), so planting should still be a go for tomorrow. YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!