Li'l Sprouts

Yay! Spring is finally here! Around this time of the year, I'm always itching to get my vegetable garden started. So far, I've got some snow peas, sugar peas, grape tomatoes and thai basil sprouting.

Last year, we started the tomato plants a bit too late and we had to wait until around September before the tomatoes were ripe enough for picking. It was rather sad to see so many new green tomatoes popping out around the end of September but didn't get a chance to ripen when the cold October weather arrived. So this year, I decided to get an earlier start with the tomato seeds and hopefully we can start harvesting by late July or early August.

In my haste to get the garden started, I may have started the pea plants too soon because according to the seed pack instructions, they can be harvested within 58 to 63 days. Since they were started 2 weeks ago, that means they'd be ready for harvesting by the Victoria Day weekend! That being the case, I decided to transplant all the pea sprouts directly into containers to be grown indoors, and then start a new batch to plant directly outdoors when the danger of overnight frost would have past which is usually around the third week in May.


No, this is not prep work for dinner, but rather it's prep work for composting. To speed up the composting process, I will finely chop up any kitchen scraps like carrot tops, tough broccoli stalks, cucumber peels, etc., before burying it in my backyard.

Here's a pile ready for composting. This is a great way to enrich my vegetable garden soil.

Here are some Thai Basil sprouts poking out, a week after planting.

This is what the grape tomato plants look like, one week after planting. These were grown from the seeds of some organic grape tomatoes I bought from the Village Market 2 years ago.

These are some sugar snap peas I started from 2 weeks ago. These are growing quite fast. They may be ready for harvesting by the Victoria Day weekend.

The snow peas in the black pot have grown even faster. They were also started from seed 2 weeks ago. I'm tempted to pick these pea sprouts now for a quick stir-fry, but my family keeps pulling me away because they want to see the pea plants grow to maturity so we can collect the pea pods. Awwwww, I can't wait that long....