It was a really nice day today and I got to do some gardening and maintenance in my front yard veggie garden.

If you didn’t know yet, I’m concentrating most of my vegetable planting in fabric pots (GeoPots, Dirt Pots, Smart Pots, etc.) in our front yard. I experimented late last year with a few GeoPots and the veggies grew really well… some, a lot better than the ones in the back yard Square Foot Garden. I think it’s because there is full sun in our front yard, whereas our back yard gets a lots of partial sun.

Almost all of the Flowering Kale and some of the Mizuna and Mustard were infested with gray Aphids (yuck), so I pulled those plants out, since they were not doing well. Two pots with the Curly Leaf Kale looks really healthy and are starting to get bigger, but I noticed that the young leaves in the center also had the gray Aphids! So I got a pump sprayer filled with just plain water and blasted the Aphids out. I’ll check the Kale in a few days and repeat if I find more Aphids.

I did some maintenace and took out some of the older dead leaves from the Collards, Bok Choy, Lettuces and Onions. I also put some bark chip mulch in the veggie pots that didn’t have any.

I harvested a bunch of greens for a big salad for the family: Romaine, Red Oakleaf and other Lettuces, Mizuna, Curly Leaf Parsley and a few (spicy) Red Giant Mustard. Yumm! We had so much salad and it was so good. I also harvested a few small Snap Peas.

My Mom saves Green Onion bottoms (with root) from the kitchen and later plants them in the garden. We had a few on the kitchen window sill, so I took those and planted them in the empty spots in one of the 7-gallon GeoPot that has Red Onions. I planted carrot seeds in half of the pot back in the fall, but they either didn’t germinate or died. I also realized that I had some Shallots that I purchased a while back and never planted, so I divided those and planted them in the same pot.

As the sun was setting, I planted two 5-gallon fabric Dirt Pots, each with four Spinach ‘Bonnie’ plants. There seemed to be a bunch more space in the pots, so I planted the young Elephant Garlic in cell-packs that I had left over from last year’s fall planting. It was getting dark, so I’ll much these with compost then bark and place the pots in the front yard.