Whoa there, mini-farm

Y'all, the garden has gone haywire.

So for those of you not in the MidAtlantic region: we kind of skipped spring around here. It was cold cold cold chilly nice-for-about-a-minute and then boom, 85 degrees. So be it -- but it seems to have confused my plants. I had growth spurts across the board, but now everything is flowering and I have a feeling I'm going to have produce ahead of schedule. This might not seem so bad, but these plants haven't gotten quite tall enough yet to support the produce so I'm not real sure what I'm going to end up with in terms of crop yield. (Farm lingo, obviously.)

Things a-growin'

So life, as always, got in the way. Lots to report from the garden/kitchen front these days...garden first. 

I decided to go big this year, both in crops and in containers. After years of attempting to grow vegetables in small pots intended for nothing more than flowers and herb bushes, I broke down and bought whiskey barrels this year - well, plastic facsimiles, but what can you do. I then proceeded to....completely overcrowd them. Here's the deal - as I wrote last time, I had bizarrely high seed-to-start rates this year. (That last cherry tomato plant eventually sprouted for a 100% rate.) I then promised the 2 extras of each to my friend so her kids could play in the dirt productively. After THAT I was a flake, forgot about that, and planted all five of each start in the barrels. So to recap: my friend got no starts and my barrels have more plants than they should because I can't bring myself to yank them back out. (Note: the tomatoless friend situation was remedied when my mother found herself in the same situation as me and brought her extra plants over to said friend.)