Rub a dub dub

I'm TA-ing for an introductory horticulture class (Plant Biology 1) and all of the students have to plant vegetable gardens. The perks of being the TA for the class is that I get access to all left-overs. Woohoo! So here's the flat of veggie starts I brought home last week to transplant.

They are all winter veggies, and the growing season in Davis never really ends, so planting a veggie garden in October isn't as absurd as it sounds.

We have cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese cabbage . . .



. . . celery, pak choi, two types of swiss chard, and two types of lettuce.



The three pictures above were taken by my lovely housemate, Crystal.

We have plans for permanent raised beds in one area of the yard, but I wanted this to actually get done now, so I used containers. A container veggie garden, oh boy.



I got these lovely, slightly expensive metal tubs from a local hardware store, and the local Ace Hardware. A screw-driver and a brick did the trick for adding drainage holes. The blue one in the middle was a failed attempt at spray painting on my part, I didn't use it in the veggie garden plantings because I have other plans for it. Spray-painting is way harder than it looks.



Here's my lovely hippy-dippy potting soil. It has organic fertilizers in it, like bat guano. No joke. I wore my gloves.


And here they are!



The lettuce is ready to harvest already because most of the transplants are kind of old and hardened off. But hey, free plants! You can't beat 'em.



I'm bashful to admit that this is my first ever vegetable garden. Isn't that ridiculous? I'm a horticulture graduate student for goodness sake. So it's an experiment. I'll keep you posted as things progress and harvesting occurs.