Way back in Spring Sue and I visited Paldo World, the huge Asian supermarket on South Tacoma Way. We went there for lunch but on the way in found a friendly but English-challenged woman selling starts.

I bought several even though I wasn't sure what they were. Eventually, I discovered they were squash, tomato, cucumber, pepper, sesame and beans.

I put several in a pot (above). Here's what happened to them:

Bean: A bush variety that grew two beautiful red streaked green beans before being eaten by deer.

Tomato: Red cherry variety. Pruned by deer on a nightly basis.

Cucumber: Died.

Pepper: Stunted growth, a few flowers. Growing next to the tomato isn't helping, I'm sure. Or maybe it smokes when I'm not looking.

Sesame: I used the leaves in salads for a while. They were OK but can't compare to Shiso (I'll blog on that in the future.)

Squash: I planted it near my corn. It's leaves look like zucchini but as you can see from the photo (below) it's definitely different. Any of you out there know what it is or what I should do with it?

Tara and I held a gardening extravaganza last night. We watered, planted another row of spinach and lettuce, a couple rows of carrots, two rows of basil (Lime and a red kind), and more cucumbers (Phil claimed, with a straight face, that he could eat 100 cucumbers. Oh, we shall see!).

We also planted those tomato and pepper starts from the Master Gardener's plant sale last weekend (see post below).

After watering, Tara and I stood back and admired our handiwork. With all those starts and the lettuce, spinach and radishes sprouting, it looked like a real garden... Then we looked around. It seems like everyone else had perfectly manicured dirt, but are holding out on planting things.

Did we jump the gun?