The garden is full of small changes. Leaves are getting bigger, plants are growing taller, and there's more and more flies, insects, and other little things enjoying the greenery. I've been trimming growing tips, to get my tomatoes taller, and so far, Cain's been the leader of the bunch, at around two feet in height. Tom and Thom are the stragglers, at about a foot tall, but I'm sure that they will catch up.
The first baby of today is a very special one. Cain got a tomato growing!
It's a cherry tomato, so maybe in a few days, it will ripen, and I will taste the first bit of the garden! On the topic of early arrivals, the Naughty Zucchini is growing big, elaborate flowers. They look like folded veils at the tip of a miniature zucchini that, if left unfertilized, drops and decays I think. These flowers are the female flowers. The male flowers are sad little stumpy things that grow in the center of the plants. Unfortunately, none of the male flowers grew in time to fertilize the first round of female flowers, so I guess the early-bird zucchini were missed. Still, I'm happy to have so many flowers this early in the season.
I'd also like to spend a bit to tell you about the cilantro plants. In Toronto, when buying herbs, you can sometimes get herb bunches with the roots still attached. That's not to say that there's a lot of the root attached, just a small, one inch stub connecting the herb bunches together. In the past, I've tried planting cilantro stalks without the roots in water, hoping that something will grow out of it, but it turns out that cilantro can't do that. However, with a bit of a root stub, can the plants thrive in dirt?
I decided to try it out, in a big white planter, next to the chives. I went to my local grocery store to buy some cilantro, and looked for the ones with the roots attached. In theory, the root can still soak up some water and feed the small leaves, enabling the plant to survive. I removed all but the smallest leaves in the center (and ate them with tacos), and planted the tiny little cilantro plants in the dirt, fully expecting most of the leaves to wilt away.
A few days passed, and some of the plants outright died. A lot of the leaves were still too big for the tiny root to support, and the plants that did survive were wilted. I continued taking leaves off, leaving only the smallest, newest leaves, in the hopes that something would catch... Around two weeks later, and here's the result:
They are still struggling, and the planter they are in lacks drainage, so I need to be very careful not to over-water them, but they took! I wonder how big they can get!
In addition to a bunch of new named plants, the garden has had some new plants join. My neighbour uprooted some wild mint plants from his side of the fence, and gave them to me, roots and all. So in they went, into a small red pot. They smell mildly of mint, but taste like any other random leaf, so I don't know if I'll use them for anything. Still, let's see what comes out. I'm naming them Ren and Minty.
Another newcomer, who should have been introduced a while ago, when we first met, is this lettuce:
I was weeding the garden in the presence of my landlord and neighbour, and they noticed a little plant with broad leaves. I was about to pull it out when they told me that it was a lettuce, and that I could keep it there. I don't know how a lettuce seed managed to find its way into the garden. None of my neighbours plant this variety of lettuce, and it wasn't there from last year, but at this point, I've adopted it as my own, and I don't care. I think I'll name it Sandwich, because I don't really see any other use for big leafy lettuce other than putting it in a sandwich.
Sandwich has been growing next to the garlics for a while now, and I hope that I'll be able to harvest some leaves off of it in the coming summer.