How does my garden grow?

No major point to this post! Just wanted to share some pictures of the herbs and vegetables I've transported up here and how they're faring.


To start with, I have two window boxes filled (left to right) with chive, chard, chives, globe basil, Fordhook giant swiss chard, and star basil.

• These chives are my phoenix plant: They have made it through three winters now, each time dying with the frost and coming back in early spring when melting snow revives them. They grow fast, and they are a great herb to use in your cooking if, like me, you hate onions with a passion.
  
• The Fordhook giant chard just keeps on coming. I have harvested about a dozen leaves four or five times for my favorite "Cheesy Chard" dish from my mom's 70s edition of "Diet For A Small Planet." And it never punks out on me like wimpy lettuce has in the past.
  
• The globe basil has disappointed me. It has grown nicely, but the leaves are tiny. I like big basil leaves that I can roll up and then do a chiffonade cut on. It is fragrant and tasty, though.

In this next picture you can see a succession of pots. From left to right, they are: Tommy Toe tomato plant, orange tree, tomato plant, more chard, cilantro (gone to seed), pepper, triple-curled parsley, more parsley, and another tomato plant.

• I wish I'd planted cherry tomatoes instead of real tomatoes. These Tommy Toe tomatoes are taking way too long! And I love cherry tomatoes. They have a lot more flavor, and I've heard that they are more nutritious too. And it's easy to pick precisely the amount of tomato you want to use.
  
• The orange tree loves it up here. I had to keep it inside where I loved previously because my balcony was too windy for this poor tree. In the past year I only got two oranges to maturity as a result. They were hilarious oranges -- green on the outside, orange and delicious on the inside. I made orange juice from them. But now I have a whole bunch of baby oranges as well as new tree growth. Fingers crossed these guys don't fall off. The only downside to keeping it outside is that you don't get the amazing smell of orange blossoms in your home.
  
• It's my fault the cilantro went to seed. The flowers were pretty and I didn't cut them. :( Even worse, for a while I forgot that this WAS cilantro and I purchased the herb from the store instead of using what I had. A shame.
  
• The pepper plant is doing great. It has two baby peppers, about a dozen flowers-turning-into-peppers, and another dozen flowers. I can't remember what kind of pepper plant it is, though. Last year I had a Serrano pepper plant that produced some seriously spicy peppers.
  
• I have been using the triple-curled parsley very heavily, and it has managed to keep up nicely. I am very pleased with my parsley plants.
  

Other than the chives, which I have had for years, I grew all of these plants from heirloom seeds I purchased at www.seedsavers.org. I learned about this site from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. The only thing Seed Savers lacks is pictures of mature plants. I like to think that would have saved me from the globe basil.