I spend my days being a semi-nerd by profession.

In my spare time, I garden. And just to tie the two together, I make spreadsheets.

Here is what my garden looks like now:

And here is the sunflower planting schedule, so we are guaranteed to have flowers in bloom on September 10th:

I realize now that I am addicted to growing cole crops. I have 18 tomatoes, 16 peppers, 8 eggplants, and a variety of melon/zucchini seeds that I wanted to plant. I need a bigger garden!

I finally started hardening off tomatoes and peppers this week. Last year I decided to start fewer plants inside, and purchase more at the local greenhouse… but I ended up buying seeds anyway. It is just so hard to resist starting plants inside! I already put in all of the cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi – and seeded radishes and carrots. The rest of the garden should be seeded within the week, so all that’s left will be tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

They look pretty good; if the weather patterns hold most of these should be able to go into the ground next weekend. I do have a row cover and some fabric in case temperatures drop into the 30s later this May.

For Mother’s Day this year, I gave my mom a row in my garden.  She planted zucchini, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, lima beans, beets … and left space for tomatoes and peppers.

We’ve had non-stop rain since then, so I’m sure her garden will grow!

Well, mostly. Everything except about 20 eggplant seedlings, which are either going in containers or replacing the broccoli raab that we’re about to harvest. Containers would be best, because then we could position them to get enough sun… but the problem then becomes finding containers for that many eggplants, and then buying dirt, soil amendments, etc. My guess is that we’ll need to replace a couple of eggplants in the front yard though, so we’re still holding off for a few days.

On Tuesday, we planted 11 tomatoes, 22 chile peppers, 2 okras, and 11 eggplants in the new front garden. The eggplants are quite small, and I’m hoping now that they’re in the ground, they will take off a bit more. We planted basil with the tomatoes, and I still have a packet of dill to plant, which will hopefully be ready around the time that our cucumbers are. Still not sure where to put the dill…

On Wednesday, we had 24 tomato plants left to plant – we managed to fit all but the one I snapped in half when transplanting (oops…) into the garden in the back. That makes 34 tomato plants in all – I’m excited to see how well they produce. I have definited freezing and canning plans for this summer, and we have at least 8 or 10 roma tomato plants, so hopefully we can make some sauces too. We also grew some specialty heirloom tomatoes: Amana Orange, Prize of the Trails Cherry, Oaxacan Pink, and Early Red Chief. One hybrid: Marvel Striped (a yellow/orange tomato). We put the three broccoli in the back yard as well.

The neat thing is that everything in our garden was grown from seed this year. We didn’t buy anything that someone already started for us. Hopefully things will come along nicely over the next few weeks so I’ll have some more exciting pictures to show off online.

You can’t see them, but they’re in there. From left to right, in the very front of each three beds, we planted Golden Chard, Chioggia Beets, and Royal Chantenay Carrots.