My 2013 vegetable garden is off to a shaky start!

A brave pepper begins its journey of growth!

Cool springs are a ying and a yang for us vegetable gardeners. The ying is that the cooler temperatures generally also mean a wet spring which has been the case so far this year. The yang has been later plantings as a result of the soil being both too wet and too cold early in the season. But, now that it has finally begun to warm up a bit, I've learned to plant on the days when it's not actively raining.

So far, at least as of May 2013, I've manage to get the following into the ground:

Onions planted as sets in March

Seed potatoes that were also planted in March

Radish seed in April

A small group of Romaine lettuce starts in mid April

Bell pepper and hot pepper starts that look a bit stringy and lanky just this past day

Nantes carrot seed on May the 7^th

Four cucumber starts on the same day (good luck with these making it)

and a lone Brandywine start that was transplanted into a large pot out front!

I still have a four pack of basil and a few more bell pepper starts that need to go out and which I hope to get done on May the 8^th even though more rain is threatening.

The National Weather Service down here in southwest Missouri is just now beginning to hint at a dry and hot week coming up! That would be good news just as long as we don't slide back into a drought condition like what plagued the Midwest last year!

With rising food prices now more or less the rule, I'm hoping to bring in a fairly decent home crop this year! Right now iceberg lettuce is going for $2 a head and a lone bell pepper is close to a dollar!