plants – Karabu Creations

I’m still trying to grow a little garden this year but had a lot of problems with my seedlings, so I have a lot fewer plants than last year. This might be for the best since we need to conserve water more every year, and I don’t have the energy right now I would need for a more ambitious undertaking.

Pictured are my very uneven tomato plants. Obviously one is much more enthusiastic than the other. Since I got a couple volunteer plants, and we had a mouse problem that ruined most of my seedlings, I didn’t actually know what type of tomato plants these were. Now that they are starting to bloom I can tell the bigger one is a cherry tomato and the other I think will probably end up being the more Roma-style tomato I grew last year.

My cucumber [plant is doing well and has some babies growing. I haven’t been successful with cucumbers before so this is exciting.

I tried adding other herbs to what I wanted to be my herb bed out in front of the house, and while the new plants are doing fine, the sage from last year is going nuts and I’m worried will take over, so I might have to trim it back so the rosemary has a chance.

Similarly, the patch I was just putting random flowers and veggie seeds in is being slowly taken over by catnip. The neighborhood cat likes to come sleep in it, and you can see the depression she leaves when she’s been there. That’s fun since we are trying to befriend her.

What I think is either broccoli or cauliflower

The number one lesson I have learned the past couple of months in my garden is to label my seed trays. I figured I was only planting a few different things, and I’d be able to tell what they were when they sprouted, so it was fine.

Narrator: It was not

I now have several nice little seedlings that I can’t identify. And I have bigger plants from earlier, like those pictured above, that I STILL can’t identify. I planted both broccoli and cauliflower. When I google what the plants should look like, they look pretty much the same. So I guess until these start to flower, I won’t know which I have. Maybe I have both? that would be cool, but I doubt it. The plants all look identical and I’d expect at least a little variation if they were different.

For a month or so I thought I had several mint plants coming along nicely from seed. Now that they’re a little bigger, I think I have no mint plants, and in fact I have several sage seedlings. They smell much more like sage than mint to me anyway. That’s great. I’ve never been able to keep my sage alive when I bought a plant from the home improvement store, so that’s why I thought these were mint. I read that mint is super easy to grow. Perhaps sage just likes it better outside than in my kitchen window? Either way, I now need to try again to get some mint started.

I did luck out that both my spinach and kale came up and they look nothing alike, so I know which is which. So maybe I can get away with no labels as long as it’s a plant I know I can identify and I have grown it before. Everything else – I must learn to label.

For Christmas, my daughter got me a set of herbal tea seeds, and – you guessed it – I planted a bunch without labeling them. Most are still super tiny and I’m (perhaps mistakenly) optimistic I will eventually be able to identify them when they get some more leaves in. However, the one below is nice and big now and I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t look like the photo on any of my seed packets. It is closest to the lemon balm, so I’m going with that for now, but the leaves look rounder on my plant than the seed pack picture. If anyone is good at identifying plants, I wouldn’t mind your guesses in the comment section.

Maybe lemon balm, but who really knows? Mint? Marjoram? Ack.

Perhaps I am very carefully tending a weed for all I know.

Tag: plants

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