Finally Gardening the Right Way ~ The Suburban Jungle

Gardening is always a learning process, but this year I am finally doing things right. Or at least one thing. I am finally thinning my plants.

Believe me, it was shear torture to rip out perfectly good plants, just to leave dead space in their places. I tried to transplant as many as I could, but I had to obey the space rules there too, and could only move a few.

I cringed when I first planted my broccoli plants - look at all this wasted space:

Broccoli

But just a month later - look what has happened. Yes you can see that I sneaked some Basil in the "dead space" I couldn't resist! And I'll thin it out later....

Broccoli - one month after planting

The tomatoes, corn, and beans are all filling in their "dead spaces" as well.

I thinned out the spinach and lettuce and had an amazing tuna salad with the thinnings. I thinned out my carrots and thought about eating them as well. All right, fine - I ate a few of them. But I wasn't really hungry at the time and knew that fresh greens would wilt shortly after picking, so I composted them.

Look at all those wasted carrot seedlings....

Next time, I'll come hungry and eat them. They were really good and fresh - with just a hint of carrot scent.

The Basil, Cilantro, Spinach, Swiss Chard, and Lettuce are all getting bigger since they were thinned out and are free from all of the problems I had last year when I was greedy and refused to thin the garden.

Here's a few shots: Notice the solitary plants in the photos. Nobody is hogging space.

Basil

Romaine

Spinach

Swiss Chard

We also have a new Zucchini growing and berries formed on our raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries. And amazingly, my 4 golden raspberries which had become 2, suddenly became 9 and after a running incident are now at 8. Perhaps the struggling is over and we will finally have all the raspberry colors in our garden....

Here's some eye candy: