Indigo Rose Tomatoes are Up!

Garden update May 5 through May 11

We had some rain and the garden plants as well as the weeds loved it!  Every thing grew!  I was very excited to see that the Indigo Rose and Early Girl tomato seeds that I had planted on May 3 had only taken six days to come up!  

 

German Giant Radishes (below) came up this week too!

So did the Reflect Spinach!

...And the Mesclun Mix lettuce as well as the Cherry Belle Radishes!

 

There is a large green plant that has come up next to the radish seedlings.  You can see it in the above picture, and in the close-up picture below.  It almost obscures the Cherry Belle Radish row label.  

I almost pulled it out, but then I noticed that it resembles one of the lettuce plants I had in that raised bed last year!  I am not certain.  Could it be that it sprouted from an underground stem/root which survived the sub-zero temperatures we had last winter?  I am not certain.  I will watch it and see how it grows.

Super-Sprint Snap Peas are doing well!

Cherry Belle Radishes are getting closer to being ready to pull!

Strawberries I planted last year are blooming!

 

And last, but not least, here is milkweed!.....  A common weed that many people rip out of their gardens. The milkweed was here when I moved here, and it returns every year.  While I don't encourage it to take over the entire garden, I keep it in a few places because it is the foodplant for the Monarch Butterfly caterpillars.  

In 2011 and in 2012 female Monarch Butterflies oviposited onto the leaves of the milkweed plants in this garden.  I so enjoy watching the caterpillars grow over the summer.  They eat only milkweed and so, depend on the plant, doing no harm to other plants in the garden.  

It is so much fun to watch the caterpillars become chrysalises in the summer and then eclose, becoming butterflies in the late Summer/early Fall.  After they become butterflies they usually hang out in the yard for a few hours before they begin their long southern migration to central Mexico where they spend the winter.

Monarch butterfly numbers are in decline and I want to give them any chance I can to survive.  

There is a free app that I have on my phone, called 'Journey North', where one can report sightings of the Monarch Butterfly whenever seen.  Journey North tracks both the Spring and Fall migrations of the Monarch Butterflies.  It was developed to enable school children and the general public to become citizen scientists in reporting valuable data about this amazing butterfly!

Stay tuned!