Progress

It may not seem like much to some, but I truly love to watch the tiny changes that happen each day in the garden.  It is those tiny changes that, one day, amount to progress!  My one shady bed that has radishes, lettuce mixes, and shallots was partly hand seeded and partly filled with transplants that we grew from seed.
 

We took great pride in digging the rows and placing the seeds one by one (and, sometimes, handful by handful).  Olivia had the great idea of using old tent stakes as labels. 

The radishes were the first to really take off.  Radishes could grow on the surface of the moon.  To me, they're like the Sylvester Stallone of veggies - they never give up.  I harvested about 10 of them last night; it was the first time I had ever eaten one.  I had no idea how bitter they were.  Guess it goes to show how tough radishes really are.

As the weeks passed,  I was a little more worried about the lettuce.  The seeds germinated pretty sparsely, so most of the lettuce was transplanted from the greenhouse (aka glassed in mudroom).   The seedlings were pretty leggy so I had a hard time keeping the leaves off of the ground.  This proved to be a problem especially when I was watering them.  The leaves would stick to the soil and begin to rot over time. So when I watered the lettuce, I had to go back and pick up each individual leaf off of the ground.

Things were still looking at little weak after a couple of weeks.  We had some cold nights and lots of rain.  On one of our dry days I decided to side-dress the bed.  I took some of the horse poo and spread it between the rows of veggies.  I then turned it into the soil.

Maybe it was luck, maybe it was the poo, but we now have some beautiful lettuce coming in!