Orchard House Farm: Is Everyone Tired of Tulip Pictures?

I'm typing away tonight with beet and blueberry stained fingers. Roasted beet and quinoa salad with fresh greens and tomatoes for dinner tonight - a cozy meal while we watch this springtime thunderstorm roll into our neighborhood. Thankfully that held off until we got home.

It's time to get the first photos of the garden up! It's mostly tulips, pansies, ranunculus, and other early bloomers.

We hypothesize that slugs may have claimed the majority of our tulip crop this year. Still, we had a few plants flourish. Here are a few favorites:

Apparently Jess included some kind of zombie steroid fertilizer in these pots. The result? Massive pansy/ranunculus production!

And from a bug's perspective. ;)

African Daisies.

I don't know what these are, but they look like the flowers with faces from Alice in Wonderland. Okay, Jess says, "Nemesia."

And the oh so lovely smelling Hyacinth!

Here are the apple blossoms. Mass amounts of apple sauce, here we come!

Poppies in the front yard.

And the veggies! We have mostly seeds or seedlings at this point, so not much for photos yet. We did, however, plant Tomato Row. Oh, it's glorious. Jess and I didn't eat dinner until almost 9 p.m. on Monday night because we were both sitting in the back lawn deciding which plants to keep and which to "adopt" out to friends and family.

I posted this photo of one of our chive plants on my Facebook page the other day and was promptly instructed by a friend to "pluck those flowers off the chive plants!" I ask you, have you ever topped a salad or scrambled eggs with chive blossoms? Not only are they a pretty garnish, but talk about concentrated onion flavor. So delish. (But he was right, not plucking the blossoms off make the stalk thick and woody. Bleh.)

We guesstimate about 14-18 tomato plants now live in Tomato Row. Last year we had these metal fencing sections formed into silos for our potato crop. A home for the potatoes to grow also proved a spectacular habitat for mice and spiders so we decided to ax the potato towers this year and put the fencing to a different use.

We dug a trench about six inches down and planted the fencing and the posts first. Then we set out the plants - determinates more towards the apple tree which will eventually be heavy with fruit and block some sun, and indeterminate plants in full sun. What are the differences between determinate and indeterminate plants? Besides the height, I have no idea. Here's a link for more detailed reading.