A Garden Update

A week into summer, our balcony garden is ever-so-slowly plugging along. A very cool and rainy spring coupled with a slow planter (me) means things are still pretty small, but I'm hoping for the best.

We've got radishes:


The soft yellow potential for a cucumber, the previous of which (last year) was eaten by a squirrel:I'm pretty sure the squirrels just sit in the trees and laugh at me all summer, swooping down later in the season after I lock the door at night to snatch whatever fruits and vegetables aren't firmly rooted in the ground. No, I'm not paranoid. Why do you ask?

Here is the biggest of our tiny romaine lettuce plants. In addition to perhaps not having enough sun, they were also overcrowded. The chicks and I pulled out every other plant last night and washed them, dipping their buttery, tender leaves in vinaigrette as some makeshift crudites. They were utterly delicious, and both girls begged for more. I have hope, still, for the lettuce:
Here's the mint plant we scavenged from the community garden. We brought home, squished in my backpack, a single, wilted stalk of a mint plant. I thought it surely wouldn't make it, but apparently mint's reputation is correct; this thing came back with a vengeance. The chicks have late summer plans for mint ice cream, and their mama has the vision of a mojito or two.
This 2$ bell pepper plant is the only plant I bought for the garden:
Ninna's preschool teacher gave her a sunflower seedling at the end of the year. Despite its small pot and insufficient sun, it was doing great until the ants started eating it. All within two days, the ants moved in and started eating anything leafy and green. We sprayed today with a cayenne pepper/cinnamon/castile soap concoction developed by mashing together several suggestions found on google. We'll see if that gets rid of those ants.
This year is our first for carrots. I don't know if they'll produce, but they've started to grow carrot-y looking greens:
The potato plant, grown for no other reason than the fact that I didn't feel like composting the leggy potato from the pantry:

A flower seedling whose name I've now forgotten, accompanied by a pill bug, or roly poly, or whatever he's called in your neck of the woods:
The strangely wrinkled seedling of the morning glory, playing host to a tiny bug. Is that an aphid? And is my google source right in telling me that the ants have moved in to eat the aphids, massacring our green leaves along with them?
Rows of peas trained to climb up suspended strings, a trick I learned at the community garden:

I love tendrils, both the word and the thing:Among the other plants still standing are a large number of basil seedlings and a few other random flowers.

What's going on in your garden today?