How does your garden grow?

I don't know about you guys, but I get a little stir crazy at the tail end of winter before everything greens up and it all looks dead, brown, soggy, grotty, and dead. Ha. So I inevitably gather up a bajillion old pots and bags of dirt that Dada graciously concedes to buying and I sift through my seed packets trying to decide what I want to plant. I didn't order any new ones this year, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best!

Starting on the left, and if everyone shows up, we will have morning glories, then pansies in the foil covered pot as they like to start in darkness, the green pot with strings to hang from will host Thunbergia which is something white and winding along with Zebrina Malva Sylvestris which, oops, looks like a hollyhock upon Googling. Oh boy. Well, continuing on, in the tan pot are some leggy lettuce sprouts, four sun gold tomatoes are starting in that red/orange pot and last but not least are zinnias and rudbeckia which is a fancy name for Black Eyed Susans, I think. I hope.

The guys in the foreground are brandywine tomato and red currant seeds while the background are Allegheny Sunset tomatoes and cucumbers. We haven’t had good luck with cucumbers since The Best Nest where Dada had the raised bed gardens complete with the soaker hoses. Here they tend to drown in the spring and shrivel up to look pickley in the summer while they are still cucumbers! 

The three pots on the floor are sun golds for Zita, on the table are Thumbelina zinnias, and between them in the plastic bin are marigolds, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, black cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, sweet basil, bee balm, more Rudbeckia, some sweet peppers, and some Genovese basil. And I still have more dirt and more seeds to play with! I’m so excited! With all this rain, though, perhaps I should begin cultivating water lilies... for our moats...

I know I've talked about this before, but some of you are new here. I tend to be more of a "let's plant these for the bees" than a "let's plant these for us" gardener. In fact, gardener is too strong of a word for what I do. I should label myself a putterer. I love plants that self-seed and I drive Dada to distraction as he, with his orderly engineer's mind, likes things tidy, in rows, cooperating with each other and not hogging nutrients while my vegetation philosophy runs towards, "flowers like to be close to their friends, too!" My things crowd each other, avoid each other, don't come up where expected, and come up where they are unexpected. I love that marigolds will crop up wherever they feel like it. "Don't pull him! That's a basil! He stays. And he stays. I don't know what that is. Let's leave it and find out; it's cute!" Can you hear Dada rolling his eyes and protesting? That's how I found out about mulleins, which are cool tall spiky plants with tons of blossoms and large, super soft leaves I've been told make an excellent substitute for toilet paper. Good to know! Especially these days, ha.  

I got a bonus seed packet of Chinese Foxglove last year, which I did nothing with because I didn't know anything about it. I had Dada look it up this year and it looks to me like borage, and even better, it says "tendency to self-sow". WOOHOO! He says I'm fired. So if you hear adult voices squabbling from our general area, carry on. It's just our annual Battle of the Blossoms.