This past weekend was packed with vegetables! June 16 was Fresh Veggie Day and June 17 was Eat Your Vegetables Day according to the Days of the Year calendar. In honor of that I'm finally ready to introduce my food garden to My Fairy Folks. I began my second venture into the food garden journey in January of this year. There's a lot to catch up on, so lets get started.
What a disaster zone!
I first cleared up all the old, dead plants. I zoned areas with cinder blocks and added new soil. (L to R) Ornamental cabbage, "Garden Salsa" pepper, (I'm not sure what this plant is because it's actually not there anymore), Jalafuego hot pepper, salvia, a dead thing I didn't want to give up on yet, red bell pepper and petunias. I've planted garden peppers before but they didn't do well due to lack of sun, so I'm hoping this second go-around will work out better for them.
Off to the right of my cinder block area is this large container of salad variety. It includes romaine, red mustard and red leaf lettuce.
I have planted Swiss chard in the past but surprisingly had never noticed how purple the roots are! How beautiful.
I thought I'd put up a diagonal barrier to separate the chard and flowers.
This area looks cute and maintained for now. I really enjoy the addition of the ornamental cabbage. This gorgeous vegetation comes in a variety of colors including purple, pink, red and white. It's labeled "ornamental" because they have a very bitter taste and are typically only found on a plate as garnish. I chose white to allow the edible plants to grab the attention. The questioning plant (shown as an empty space in the photo above) didn't do well so I replaced it with mustard greens.
After only three weeks, we were ready to start picking lettuce from our own salad garden!
The butter lettuce (center with yellow flowers) grew very full and took up more room than I set aside for it. It was a surprise since I discovered it "hitchhiked" it's way into my garden, but I plan to get some more in the future because this stuff is so good! I'll be sure to show you some more photos from my growing food garden soon. Do you grow any edibles?
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