How Does Your Garden Grow?

My garden is growing!!! I'm so excited. This is the first year I've started plants from seeds (most of them anyway) and they seem to be hanging in there. We had a rough patch with very little growth for what felt like a couple of months, but I think I've figured out what was going wrong, and now everything is heading in the right direction again. When I was trying to problem solve I first turned to fertilizer. When that didn't help, I thought about it some more and decided to cut back on my daily watering schedule. Bingo- after not watering for a few days then going to every other day, all of the plants are greening up and getting noticeably bigger. I have 10 tomato plants, 3 collard green plants, and a row of lettuce that I planted using a pre-prepped strip. My tomatoes from seed are Brandywines, red cherries, and jelly beans. I also picked up two tomato plants from Home Depot. One of those is a container variety and I can't remember what kind the other one is. The collards are also from Home Depot.

The lettuce strip was so easy to plant and now I have a full row of little green seedlings pushing up through the soil. I started some lettuce from regular seeds and tried putting it in a container but it bolted right off the bat, so I planted the strip directly into the garden to see if that would yield better results.

I'm hoping we'll have tomatoes like we did last year- they were so delicious! I think I waited to late to start the new plants, and then I had the difficulties with them not growing, so we're really behind. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, though! Gardening is a learning experience for sure, and I am such a novice, but it's fun and the results, when I get it right, are so mouth watering that it's worth it to keep going!