Saturday Farmer's Market - 5/4/13

Saturday Farmers Market is a weekly event originally created by the beautiful and nature loving, Heather at Capricious Reader. It's a weekly event that celebrates gardening, be it your own garden or gardens around you; local food, be that at your local farmers market or at a restaurant or festival that celebrates eating locally; a recipe that you've created using fresh ingredients or a whole cookbook; and veggies, flowers, herbs and farm goods galore. Anyone and everyone can participate. It was originally started within the book blogging community but I'd love to see it expand beyond as well. You don't have to have a garden or grow veggies to participate, just post about how veggies, flowers, local farms, etc. have impacted your life this week. You'd be surprised! It may be too cold to grow things and it may be too hot to grow things, but you may just want to post about the plans you have for when the ground thaws. Or maybe even share with us how your community aims to keep things more sustainable or even about the local trails and nature offerings around you! This will also connect really well with Mrs. Beth Fish's Weekend Cooking ;) Thanks Heather for letting me take over the reigns for this wonderful idea that spawned from your creative brain :) Feel free to leave the link to your post in the Mr. Linky below, spread the word, and come back to read everyone else's posts as well! 

Saturday Farmer's Market is back after a hiatus for a week for the readathon last weekend! And my garden has had plenty of time to grow in the meantime :) I, on the other hand, haven't done much of anything on the blog since last week and I apologize for that. I can just say I'm trying to get my blogging mojo back and should hopefully be back in the next few days! But let's talk gardening today, shall we? Yes we shall!

Eggplant....it always gives me hell! I don't know if I've ever successfully grown eggplant and I don't know what the hell I do wrong. Does anyone have suggestions on successfully growing eggplant? The flowers on mine always just fall off and die. Since I'm stuck with containers while I'm at my apartment I DID put my plant in a bigger container that drained better and gave it better draining soil and since doing that the plant has done much better and it has it's first flower! Now to keep that flower on.....

The peppers seem to be doing good so far! I actually have three different pepper plants, I'm only showing you two here. I've already picked a couple of jalapenos this year, but you can see on the left that it looks like there will be no shortage of them! Nor will there be a shortage of bell peppers apparently! These are little babies. But they should grow to be pretty decent sized bell peppers. These are the stuffing kind...the big ones. I also have a plant that gives me smaller ones that I'll use just for seasoning when I'm cooking :)

The tomatoes are all doing really good! This isn't even close to all of them. I seriously don't know what I'm going to do with all of them! They're doing much better on the patio this year than they did last year...I think I just got better soil and better containers this year PLUS I gave them a natural fertilizer too. I think they liked that :)

The herbs are all continuing to do really good! And that little container in the front with the new stuff popping up is dill that I planted from seed which I've actually never grown before! I planted dill on one side and I'm growing stevia on the other side which has actually sprouted but it's not even visible in the picture. I just recently trimmed back all the herbs and they're all being dried right now so I can refill all of my spice jars!

I'm actually going to get oranges off of my tree this year! I was worried that the winter wasn't cold enough and that when all of the blossoms would fall off, no oranges would stick. And a lot of the "would be oranges" are falling off with the blossoms but as you can see there are a few that are staying on and turning a darker green and getting bigger :D YAY!

I seem to have been right about the african daisies! They apparently just needed to be moved to a different spot. They're starting to bloom again now that they're in a sunnier spot :D YAY! And the sunflower root that I planted keeps growing bigger every day! I'm very curious as to how big this thing will get in a pot. Gurney's said 3-10 feet. I'm assuming it'll be closer to 3 feet since it's in a pot. But! Behold this:

These are (I believe) lilies. And I swear I didn't think anything was ever going to happen with them. For real. They just kept growing and growing and growing in the bulb pot that I planted. They are nearly as big as me. These buds that finally came out are eye level with me! I'm so so so curious as to what they're going to look like when they bloom!!! They better be pretty damn magnificent!

And these are my pride and joy this week :) These are all of the other bulbs surrounding the lilies that I also thought weren't going to do anything. Now all of a sudden they're spitting out these GORGEOUS flowers every day! Does anyone know what they are? I feel like I should totally know this but I don't :/ The colors are so beautiful and so vivid. They make me smile every day :) And they smell like heaven! It's so worth the wait when you have flowers like this come up.

So what's going on in your garden? Let me know in the Mr. Linky below! And spread the word :)

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