Urban gardening update, May 12th.

(I'm trying something special this year and am keeping a "photo blog," telling my story mostly through images but with a bit of description added as well, concerning my first-ever year of being an urban gardener. Check the "Garden 2014" photoset at my Flickr account for the entire series, including more photos for each entry than you see here.)

May 12: Well, all right, it was out with the old and in with the new this last weekend -- so I tossed all the plants I accidentally killed during the Great Garden Freezeout of 2014, finally repotted all the viola and mesclun sprouts I had from my April 8th planting, and started my fifth round of seeds, although this time only stuff I've planted before (more cinnamon bail, more spinach, more mesclun, more lettuce, more morning glories and more moonflowers). And not much else to report today, other than that you can see how my basil plants are doing after their first major harvesting last Thursday for my dinner party -- these two large pots of containers yielded a total of one cup of leaves, so I'm obviously going to have to grow a lot more basil next year if I want to have things like homemade pesto on any kind of regular basis. (In fact, this is one of the major conclusions I'm coming to here in my first year of gardening; that for this to be a truly sustainable garden, I need to concentrate the majority of my available windowsill space to multiple pots of staples like lettuce, spinach and basil, then occasionally throw in some other stuff like onions, sage, rosemary, etc.) That's basically the same lesson you can get as well from these photos of the mature salad-green plants, which I'll finally be harvesting next week for my first salad; even though the two pots (one mesclun, one looseleaf lettuce) are growing great, they're not going to yield much more than one small salad's worth of leaves. The big question right now is how fast it'll take for these plants to replenish themselves; that will determine just how many pots I want concurrently growing of this stuff next year. More soon!