Last week, I had three peppers become separated right above the ground. Is it a cutworm? Is it a bird? The peppers just seem not to be growing much outside too. It may still be pretty cold for them. So I cheated and bought an orange and green bell pepper plant. I also bought a poblano pepper plant for fun. The transplanted Hungarian hot wax pepper form last year decided to bloom out, so it can’t be that bad for peppers outside.

I also bought a Japanese eggplant. Hopefully it will do better than the eggplants I had last year that never created a fruit bigger than a baseball.

I have tried to grow leeks so many times this year. I’ve run out of seed and I had no seedlings to show for it. I also purchased a pot of leeks, and separated them out around the garden. I’ve never grown them before, but this looks like the only way I’ll be able to do it.

All of my green onion seeds have been duds too. Bought the last packet I’m going to buy, and we’ll see what happens. My mother planted a bunch of Egyptian walking onions in the compost pile last year, and those are going pretty strong. Maybe we can subsist of of those for a while. I really like to put green onions in salsa.

You can definitely tell the cherry/grape tomatoes from the other ones. The cherry/grape tomatoes are always much taller, and I’ll have to cage them soon! I haven’t even staked them yet.

This year, I didn’t buy compost. I scraped the bottom of the compost pile out back, and transferred and mixed that soil into last year’s beds. This resulted in 4 kinds of weeds: wild thyme, tomatoes, fennel, and cumbers. I’ve been digging out the cucumbers and transplanting them. Fennel gets pretty big, so I’ve only transplanted a few of those. The tomatoes and the rest of the fennel get ripped out!

In the past year, the 4 empty apartments next to our tower have become occupied! They’re getting together and making their own community garden. They’re working on a rainwater irrigation system, and just started planting this week. Here are some pictures from this week when they added some compost to the raised beds.

We also had a small asparagus harvest this week.

Everything I planted is just starting to come up. There is some bad news, I’ve had three tomatoes die on me. Two look like they were cut off or snipped off by animals, and one just was dead one day. Almost all of the cucumbers I started inside died, but I’ve got plenty of volunteer ones coming up this week. I’ll have to transplant those. Some of the lettuce has changed from seedling to something that actually looks like lettuce. Some of the weeds look like hundreds of tiny tomatoes, maybe they are?

My neighbor Sam and I are thinking about making some jelly or mango chutney this weekend. I know canning is meant to preserve what you can’t eat right away, but I think it is also a good way to make a big batch of food from fresh ingredients and save it for later. The Natural Resources Defense Council website tells me that strawberries, blackberries, oranges, and peaches are in season in Texas and Mississippi. The website helps you know what is fresh and in season from your local CSA or Farmers Market, or what is being imported from an adjoining state.

My mother-in-law got me a pressure cooker and a preservation book for the holidays this year. Sam is picking out some recipes today, and maybe we’ll garden and preserve tomorrow.