From left to right: Scallions, zucchini, basil, carrots. And yes, there is such a thing as white carrots. 
In the main garden space our potatoes and strawberries are growing faster than the urban myths and legends about Osama Bin Laden's murder. Our asparagus hasn't popped back up yet, which leads to fear the worst for it. This weekend we'll plant the tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and egg plant we started from seed.
In the smaller former rose garden we've got peas, spinach, Swiss chard, lettuce, onions, carrots, radishes, and two varieties of squash planted in those containers in front of it.
In the white containers I planted several varieties of peppers that include, Hungarian wax, Cherry bomb, Kung Pao, long red chili, and sweet red bell. 
It was sunny and in the lower 80's here yesterday. I feel sorry for those of you who aren't through with winter yet. And yes, we've got peas, onions, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and strawberries coming up out in the garden.
One of the first things we did was put our rain barrels back outside. This is rain barrel number one, it's our third year with barrels and the new one out front should help immensely. We won't have to lug buckets of water around front anymore, yay! We're hoping the fish we put inside all of them will keep down the mosquitoes, but four out of five of the ones up front passed on already. They're only .13 cents each so if we have to buy more, it won't break the bank.
Composter number 2 is out and working. It's about half full of leaves and vegetable matter food scraps.
Composter #1 is composting away. I dug out a good sized chunk of rich black dirt from this composter a few weeks ago and we added it to the soil in the main garden. As you can see, our leaf bin is full of nice wet decaying leaves just waiting to be added to our composters.
Sparky has already begun planting in the former rose garden. She put peas in this past Sunday and she erected her pea trellises too. She also planted some frost tolerant veggies to the right of the peas. She's planted carrots, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and onions. If the cold does come back, and it might, this is spring after all, and kills the lettuce and spinach, it no problem because it's so early we can just replant.
In the main urban homestead garden, as you can see, we did away with most of the raised beds we made last year. We decided to go with a raised mound system for the most part. We'd seen how well it worked in a community garden a few blocks from us so we decided to try it here. We'll plant potatoes, peppers, broccoli, egg plants, some herbs, and more in those mounded rows. 
We kept the raised strawberry bed, and as you can tell the strawberries are going gangbusters already. In the other raised bed we kept we have some asparagus growing, this is it's second year, so hopefully next year we can actually harvest some!
Sparky's urban homestead herb garden next to the back of the house looks a little sparse, that chives, sage, and thyme growing in there now, but soon it will be busting forth with rich green basil, tarragon, lemon grass, and more.
We've got two varieties of tomatoes, broccoli, egg plant, and sun flowers started. And after a little over a week of concentrated light on the three trays of seeds, we've already got a slew of growth!
The seeds really respond to the 16 to 18 hours a day of light and they've taken off. Of course planting them in seed starter mixture and keeping them moist helps a bunch too.
As you can see it's in fine shape, I have no idea how old it is, the previous owner left it after she sold the place to us. There's no cracks or any other damage to the unit so I decided to plow ahead and remake it in to our newest compost unit.
The first thing I did was flip it over and drill a bunch of hole in the bottom for drainage and to allow worms and bugs to crawl inside it. The worms and bugs help break down the organic vegetable matter and their waste helps break down the leaves as well. Actually, worm waste is one of the best, if not the best natural fertilizer for gardens.
After drilling I turned the can back up and I locked the handles in place. They were sturdy enough but just to be safe and to make sure no critter could knock off the lid and spill out our contents, I put a bungee cord over top of the lid and it keeps the top on nice and tight with no worries.
Because the can has wheels I wanted to make sure I could roll it around to mix the vegetable and brown matter up together nicely, so I laid the can down and I rolled it around in the back yard.
The end verdict is that it rolled around just fine with no problems.
So I put in a couple of handfuls of leaves from our leaf bin and I added some vegetable scraps and I rolled it around again. Then I moved it around to a couple of different places in the back yard.
I ended up putting it next to the heat pump unit because the sun hit there pretty much all the day long, which will help cook contents together and make some rich black soil in a few months. The chief advantage of using this trash can on wheels is I can wheel it around to different place sin the yard to make sure it gets plenty of sun all the time, even in the winter months. Our old composter, which I have dubbed R2D2, sits in one place, a partially shaded part of the back yard and therefore it will take longer for the stuff inside it to break down, which by the way it does great because I've gotten three wheelbarrows full of rich black dirt out of it and we've had it for almost a year.
We made a space in the front yard to grow some watermelons and pumpkins. We did this by digging up some of the grass and laying a good thick layer of leaf mulch over it and then dumping a couple bags of topsoil over that. I transplanted some of the watermelon plants that were growing in one of the backyard beds, we moved them so we could plant corn in it's place, and I added some seeds in case the transplants don't make it. Watermelons are on the left and on the right I planted pumpkins. I also planted some Japanese egg plant seed around the front edge of the pumpkin mound.
The tomatoes and cukes that Sparky planted out front are looking good.
We've been enjoying the lettuce we planted but the spinach has been a disappointment. Sparky planted some onions in that bed and she's going to plant some lettuce seeds so that we can have more in a few weeks.
Potatoes, that's them in the right hand corner of the picture, are looking good.
My daikon radishes are growing like crazy. I pulled one today and it is delicious.
Our carrots are coming along nicely. We've almost gone through our first planting of onions, lucky for us we've replanted a slew of them. So we'll have many more to come in a few weeks.
I've had to stake all the tomatoes last week and I had to tie some of them again today because there has been so much growth in the past week. Our peas, squash, cabbage, and most everything else is taking off too.
Little soon to be tomatoes!
Squash blossoms!
And the potatoes and carrots that we're growing in containers are coming along swimmingly.
Starting from the bottom left we've got strawberries in the first box, parsley and asparagus in the middle box, tomatoes and zucchini (which hasn't sprouted yet) in the third. In the center row we've got a different variety of tomato and cucumber in the first box, cauliflower and cabbage in the middle, and peas in the last box. On the back row we've got yet another variety of tomato and okra, in the middle box are eight varieties of peppers, and watermelon is in the last box.
In the former rose garden we've got onions coming up nicely, carrots, daikon radish, potatoes, lettuce, and spinach planted. We decided to plant in some of our containers as well so we planted carrots in the purple tub and two kinds of potatoes in the other two containers. 
