Gardening Season 2025

My kitchen garden - brand new - is doing great. I’ve got kale, cavalo nero, spring greens, onions, spring onions, shallots, garlic, lettuce, beetroot, french beans, peas, broad beans, fennel, carrots, potatoes. Swede going in this weekend. Loads of herbs all doing well. But, for the life of me, I can’t stop my coriander from bolting. WHY!

I’m getting about half a pint of raspberries per day right now.

It does that.

If you want to have leaf stage cilantro/coriander all season, you have to keep replanting it. There are strains that bolt more slowly than others, but there aren’t any that I know of that won’t bolt at all.

(The same, by the way, is true of lettuce.)

After several years of not feeling up to doing any gardening, I decided to give it a try again this year. I got off to a late start, but last month I got my pots out of the storage space and set them up on my deck, then went to Lowes and bought two Beefsteak tomato plants, two banana peppers and a purple bell pepper (because I thought it would make an interesting addition to what I can get at the store). I also picked up a basil and sage plant and some lettuce and radish seeds for the windowsill pots.

A month later everything is doing well. I had to put in stakes for the tomatoes, and all the plants are flowering and there’s a bell pepper forming. The sage plant is looking a bit ill, but th basil is ready to be trimmed for cooking. I haven’t tried to check on the radishes, but the leaf lettuce will be contributing to the next salad I fix.

Oh - I should observe that, despite the weather, as usual the weeds seem to be having no problem! :angry:

The peppers and tomatoes are coming in. One of my potatoes looks ready for new potatoes.

I probably should have paid more attention to the labels for my zucchinis. I planted 8-ball zucchinis which are round. Those are coming in, too. I just have no idea when they’ll be ripe.

Generally you don’t want to eat ripe zucchini; they’d be seedy and woody. You want to eat young zucchini. How young depends on the recipe. If you want them to grate for zucchini bread, you want them older than if you want to saute them. For the latter, any size big enough that you want to bother with them will do. Little ones should be tender and delicious.

Just gave away some boring green hostas on freecycle. I love giving away plants! People are so thankful, and I feel better not just throwing them out.

Gardeners are so generous. Which is good because we spend a lot on our gardens. It’s nice when you can some for free.

We planted 8-ball zucchini a few years ago, and they were very good. We’ve harvested 15 regular ones so far. Two of the volunteers are regular zucchini, which never happened before. The other two are either butternut or spaghetti squash, they are not far enough along to tell yet. I’m now sorting the recipes by how many zucchinis they take.
We’ve harvested about 10 pounds of peas and the string beans are starting. Lots of little green tomatoes.