Garden happiness.

Like a proud parent showing off photos of her kids, I have photos of my Summer 2009 veggie garden.  It's a well-planned adventure, complete with some crude, hand-drawn blueprints and a hefty amount of Corry's Slug & Snail Death.  Those little slimebags (quite literally) have bothered with my garden for the last time.  It's war.

First off, we have:

This my latest weapon.  It has the best product name ever and I have high hopes for it. Cardboard-packaged death- how awesome is that?!?  I have a friend that was trying to bait them with beer, which they then drown in, but it wasn't working. And I'm not wasting beer on slimy invertebrates.

So next, we have the tomato section.  The big ones are Better Boys.  I had great success with these last year and I'm determined to keep them contained and NOT allow the Tomato Tangle to develop like last year.  The little guy on the right is a Green Zebra, and it was just upgraded from plastic pot to the planter today.  It was like a graduation day for it.  I'm about as emotionally attached to it as one can get towards a plant, I grew it from a seed and it's been doing great.  The two bigger ones are growing at about 1in a day, and have yellow flowers, I may be having tomatoes soon!  I love living in Southern California.

Shifting to the left of the Tomato Patch, is the lettuce patch.  This summer, the most real estate in my garden is going towards lettuce.  We eat a ton of it and it's easy so I feel rad.  Pretty much, the planter space you see in this frame is all dedicated to lettuce.  The heads in there are mostly ready to be picked, I just feel sad because my seedlings are not quite ready to go in yet and as soon as I pick these the patch will be bare.  So I'm stalling.  This is also ground zero for the Snail/Slug War, so there's a lot of Corry's around this area.

Shifting left again, you see the Bell Pepper Patch.  From the right side of this photo to the tallest plant is still lettuce patch territory, but there are 3 pepper plants to the left of that.  I did well with bell peppers last year.  They like it hot, so I'm hoping, for their sake and definitely not mine, that this summer is good and warm-hot.  The tallest plant survived winter and is making flower buds so this could be cool.  So we've got orange, purple (for wow factor) and red. They grow slow, I planted these at the same time as my tomatoes and the tomatoes have smoked the peppers in the growth category.

Shifting further left, is Cucumber Land.  I was tired of "patch", "land" seemed appropriate. Anyway, this is a pretty lame picture, because the cucumber plants are so teeny you have to look for them- but they're MINE.  So I post pictures of them.  Because they're so small and defenseless, they're going to get the Frat Party treatment (nightly covering with Dixie cups) until they're big enough to survive a snail.  I had a snail mow through a baby lettuce plant last night so I'm pretty ticked off.  Cucumbers are GREAT in a small garden, I had so many last summer!  I've got a slicing cucumber and a Persian cucumber, the Persians are ready at about 3-4in and are sweet.  I planted them too late last year so it will be nice to see what a whole summer can do for it.

And this is the nursery.  This is where my baby seedlings live until they are big enough to live in the planters.  So cute.  So... dirty.

I love my garden.  I may not have studied about emergency nursing today, but I'm setting us up for a summer of food.  So I got THAT going for me...