Sarah's Garden Week 3: Progress!
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
I had been waiting to write this update until it got hotter and the garden finally "popped" and guess what? It did!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/13946786307/
[brambles]
The peas have flowers on them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/14153532333/
[pea flower]
and peas!!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/13986304728/
[dirty fingers means I'm a good gardener, right?]
Lots and lots of peas...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/13986302050/
And lots of lettuce!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/14193052743/
[romaine]
I'm not kidding about the lettuce. I picked a bunch of it for dinner last week...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/14149786866/
[lettuce for dinner]
and the next day I went out and you couldn't even tell I had picked any leaves. Like magic!
And speaking of magic, this:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/14149773736/
[root]
just appeared growing next to the lettuce. I saw some strange leaves growing so I tried to pull them out...they broke off and I knew I hadn't gotten the whole thing but I left it. About a week later the leaves were back and bigger, so I grabbed the top of the root and pulled and out came this thing:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/13986305370/
[mystery]
I have absolutely no idea what this is. There is an equal chance of it being some seed or seedling that I threw in the raised bed and forgot about or a weed. The thing is, I do a lot of weeding in my back yard and I know most of the weeds by now - and I've never seen this one. I thought it was a carrot-like thing but the leaves aren't feathery enough for that, in fact they're an entirely different structure from carrot tops (carrot leaves are tri-pinnate and these are simple.) It smells and looks like a parsnip (white flesh) but again, the leaves don't match. So I'm assuming it's a weed that some sort of animal buried in there but I'm still very curious. Any ideas?
Also in strange garden mysteries, this parsley is doing wonderfully and two weeks ago I was sure it was dead.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10982903@N05/13986294170/
[parsley!]
I had this parsley in a pot last fall and forgot about it until I was frantically running around trying to get all the pots with plants in them inside before the first frost. I actually wasn't planning on saving the parsley - I was more worried about the nice terracotta pot it was in - but then the parsley seemed like it was surviving (barely...) so I kept watering it over the winter. I finally put it back outside and then needed the pot for something else and instead of throwing out the parsley decided to try to fill up some empty space in my raised bed with it to keep the cats out. I didn't know what it was the other day and actually thought it was a fallen branch or something in there but no! Healthy parsley it is. The green in the back of the parsley is mint, another incredibly hard-to-kill herb.
Soon it will be time for tomatoes!
