How Does Your Garden Grow: Just Starting

I am definitely not a green thumb. I really don’t like doing yard projects and I have no idea how to do them. I have a few plants in our house and amazingly, they have done okay with my guessing and blundering at how to take care of them. I’m sure with a bit of research they could look amazing but I’m not too interested so I just water them and give them some plant food once in a while and call it good. I figure I will just replace them if (when) they die. But for some reason, this year, I got the itch to have a garden. I must be crazy!

It actually started last year because I really love veggies and when they’re fresh it’s the best. But I never got around to actually planting anything so this year I decided to give it a try. And I actually did :) Amazing!

My first step was to go to the store and buy some seeds. I know lots of people just buy the plants to get a head start but I really wanted to be able to watch the seeds come up for the first time. Since it’s still early in the season, I started with tomatoes, jelly bean tomatoes, and spinach. I read all of the directions and times for when to start them for our area and ended up planting them on March 29. I planted the tomatoes in an egg container and am keeping them indoors and the spinach was planted in a pot outdoors since they can handle the cooler weather. Here they are:

Spinach…

and tomatoes! Half of the container are the jelly bean tomatoes and the other half are the regular. Here are the seed packets I used:

So I have a question to send out into the blog world. I bought these seed packets for $1 each. They also had seed packets that were organic for $2 each. Wouldn’t they all end up being organic by the time you grow them? Does it really matter? I thought it was funny at the time, just put the organic label on them and charge twice as much, but now I really want to know. Is anyone out there an expert on these matters?

Since this is my first time doing anything like this, I thought I’d better start a little gardening notebook to record the happenings so next year if I have questions, I can refer to it. I will definitely be recording successes and failures.

Then the most exciting thing happened today! I went to go water them and I found the first little shoots coming up! Nothing yesterday and then today, Bam! It made me so happy. I was getting a little worried that I had done something wrong but I guess everything is as it should be. Here they are, my little tomato babies:

There was only one spinach shoot that came up and it’s really tiny, can you see it?

I think they are so cute and I’m excited to see what will happen. Cross your fingers for me that I don’t kill them but can enjoy spinach and tomatoes all summer! I’m also hoping to plant a few more things when it gets a bit warmer but I’m still deciding what. Any suggestions?