In Which I Discuss my Garden (WARNING: if you don't care about the state of my garden, don't read this. You will be bored)

My garden looks like a jungle. My plants are all growing at rates that far exceed what I would have ever expected - especially since I haven't used any fertilizer yet beyond what was in the potting soil. Although everything is growing well, not everything has proven to be successful (due to user error, not because of the plants themselves). My broccoli, for example, produced a beautiful floret that was perfect for eating right when I went on vacation. My roommate, who watered the plants while I was gone, didn't cut it off, so it flowered. I also learned that 2 broccoli in the same pot doesn't work well. One of the plants grew to be enormous, while the other just stopped growing because the first was taking all the nutrients. Some of my herbs (my oregano, cilantro, and catnip) are producing flowers so quickly, I can't keep up with them. This is particularly bad for the cilantro, which when it flowers, stops produing the useful and tasty leaves that are used for seasoning. I got two varieties of lavender, one which hasn't flowered at all, and the other which turns out to have the wrong kind of flowers for harvesting. It's really pretty, but it's purely ornamental. My oregano got some sort of oregano disease. I separated it from the rest of the plants, and it hasn't spread to anything else, which is good.

On the other end of the spectrum are the plants that have done exactly what I wanted them to do. My strawberries gave off a nice amount of fruit. To be truly worthwhile, however, I think I would need twice as many plants as I had this year. My everbearing plants produced a small amount, while my June bearing variety had the highest yield - plus, they just tasted better. My sugar snap peas have given me enough peas for 2 small side dishes, and there's enough on the plants for one more. Once they start to bear fruit, they look horrible - the leaves all start to die as the plants give all of their energy and nutrients to the seeds. I planted a second round of peas - this time with about 2 1/2 times as many seeds as I used for the last batch. They're one of my favorite foods, and as far as I'm concerned I can never have too many sugar snap peas. My cherry tomatoes have far surpassed what I was expecting. My balcony gets partial shade, so I figured I'd be lucky if I got anything at all from the plant. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. The first cluster of tomatoes ripened on the vine - there were too few to make anything from, so I gave them to friends (I hate raw tomatoes, but love them in sauces). Currently, there are dozens of green tomatoes that all appeared at the same time, so they should ripen and provide plenty of fruit for cooking.

It's still too early to tell if my carrots and zucchini will be successful. The zucchini looks like something from the Jurassic era - huge leaves that just keep getting bigger and bigger. They haven't flowered yet, but I'm confident that I will soon have more zucchini than I know what to do with. Zucchini grows really well in this part of the world. My carrots are growing, and I think they will turn out well. I had to separate a few that were growing too close together (if you've ever tried to plant carrots, you know that the seads are absurdly tiny, and it's hard to avoid accidentally dropping a couple of seeds in the space where only one seed is supposed to go). I tried transplanting the carrots, but they don't seem to be doing well. I might just have to give those up as a lost cause and just be happy for the ones that made it.

Then there are the plants I bought from my school's plant sale (Bastyr has a wonderful medicinal herb garden, and they sell herbs and seeds whenever they are available). I decided on a mugwart plant - specifically the Chinese variety that is used for moxa, a calendula plant, and a valerian plant. All three are doing amazingly well. There are 3 baby mugwart shoots in the pot that were really unexpected since it hasn't flowered. The Calendula keeps on flowering, and the valerian is looking good. I need to research how to harvest valerian becuase the root is what's used for medicinal purposes.

Overall, I would say that my garden experiment has gone extremely well. At some point, I seem to have developed a green thumb. I managed to kill almost all of my plants last year, so the difference is impressive. Plus, it's a lot of fun.