The wheat is now 6″ tall, it looks just like fescue and seems to be doing well. Sun flowers all came up fine, BUT some of the babies got scythed down by the multitude of rabbits roaming the ‘burb. I sprayed ’em with hot pepper solution, it didn’t really do much except to stain the leaves and make them sad looking. Some survived and have decent stems, I think the rabbits only liked the new growth ( mature stalks are really tough).  I went ahead and planted 8 each in long planter boxes on the back patio, it gets 5-6 hours of sun and is pest-free so maybe they will do better initially.

Onions are being difficult. My starter pot is full of spindly babies, they supposedly love light but seem also to fall over in full sun. I’m trimming them to 4″ to foster stem girth and basically pampering them full tilt. I have 5 more started in the ground, out front by the sunflowers, so it’s Darwinism time. They may need to be outside in dirt from the get go, we will see.

Lettuce is small and slow growing, they are getting there but they might bolt before I get enough to make a small bowl of greens. Spinach is over, bolted, so we are eating what’s left and letting the rest go to seed. I discovered spinach likes cool weather, so that means I get like 2-4 weeks after the last hard frost and bolting (spring), and who knows in the fall. This area flips to hot and stays there until October, so salad greens may be highly seasonal or just a buttload of small stuff when I can grow it.  Hot peppers? Hell yeah, they are booming so there’s gonna be plenty of fiery “apocalypse produce”. That was supposed to be a occasional spicy treat, not sustenance but I’ll take it.   Thank God something’s actually yielding. Broccoli looks good so far, carrots OK but small, bell peppers in the Jalapeno category i.e. rocking. Those were seedlings, but I also have seeds coming up as well.

The lesson is to ALWAYS TRY THE PLAN BEFORE THE CRISIS. There’s so many things that go wrong, there was no way I could simply dig up my yard and plant random Home Depot seed  and expect a cornucopia to blossom forth.  Yeah that sounds retarded but seeds are a part of most survival packages, sort of pointless really without the practical experience of actually growing things. I’m learning a TON of things about gardening, I grew up on a farm and we had one but I didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on. I actually was more into my Mom’s activities, pressure canning and sewing but i didn’t pick up that much there either. More than gardening, sadly.

Last random topic: sugarcane.  I was thinking about how to make sugar, checked into bees and decided that was a bad idea. But, you can raise sugarcane here and it grows like weeds. You cut the stalks, press, then cook the juice and voila it is syrup. I’m trying this next year, along with raising rice in a mini-paddy.  This is a lot of fun, plus I get valuable survival skills just in case.  And it baffles the neighbors.