Happy Hour In The Garden, What’s Growing

Hey guys,

Sorry I’ve been a bit missing here at Brooklyn Farm Girl.  If you follow me on Instagram (I hope you are!) then you know I’m still around, but it’s been a busy few months. Right now we’re putting finishing touches on a Mother’s Day video that I will post on Friday – get ready for bling bling envy!   Besides working and trying to find time for the cats (I miss them so much when we work to midnight!) we also need to spend time in the garden! Right now the Spring garden is planted and we are putting aside a day this weekend to bring in the Summer plants (tomatoes! tomatillos! peppers! more!).    With such a busy schedule right now I really value our time in the garden as it’s the best time to relax (sometimes I even leave my phone downstairs so no phone calls or emails, gasp!).     Happy Hour in the garden is the best time, it’s around 6-7PM where the sun set is setting and you can see it glaring off the skyscrapers in Manhattan.  We cheers with some Diet Coke, hold hands, and marvel at our baby broccoli plants.  I think we all need a garden moment.

 

 Let me give you a little tour of how the plants are doing and what’s growing this Spring!

You might have rememebred the peas were planted.  Well,  they’ve all come up and have begun climbing! We inserted the stakes and fences so now they have a journey to climb high.   As they climb, we will keep helping them attach, but they really do the majority of work themselves.  

Here are the Collard Green plants!  This is the first year growing them and I cannot wait to eat them!

Seriously, get in my belly.

The broccoli is looking great and really started growing.  

I haven’t spotted any broccoli heads yet, but any day now…!

Cauliflower is one of my favorite looking plants.   These guys are in the beginning stages. 

Bok choy  is great, as always.  We never have any problems with this plant, except figuring out what to do with it all! If you’ve never tried growing bok choy you should give it a shot.  Also pictured here at the very bottom is some onions!

In some other news of what’s happening, carrots (seeds below) and radishes were planted.  The radishes already came up, but the carrots haven’t shot through the soil yet.

We’re expanding again.  I think I say that every year, but we just love growing new things and also figuring out what we need to grow more of.  This year we’re going to have a ton more tomato and tomatillo plants.  We just went through the last bag of salsa verde, and we have a few months left to go until tomatillos are read to be picked.  So we’ll be growing a bunch more plants so we’re never left without salsa!    With that, we’ve been rearranging and refreshing some of the containers to get ready for tomato, pepper and tomatillo planting that will happen this weekend.

The seedlings (which look great I have to admit!) are enjoying their first day outside this week.  We’re prepping them to live outside.

A change this year in the garden is we won’t be growing strawberries any more. We’ve had fun with them the last few years but I’m ready to move on.. to raspberries! I ripped out the strawberry plants and refreshed all the containers.

It was a bit sad to see the strawberries go, especially that there was green already on the plants.  But we’re going for a better yield so we needed to try something new.

So we have 5 raspberry plants that all have just started to bloom.  This is our first raspberry adventure – any advice? 

By the looks of the raspberry plants also starting to grow through the soil I’m guessing these are going to be bushy plants.  I’m interested to see how big they can grow in containers!