Gardening is like a box of chocolates

Gardening is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you're going to get.

What is all this? I don't know yet. When seeds first come up, they all look pretty much alike. All seed plants produce either one (monocots, including corn and other grasslike plants) or two (dicots, including most other vegetables and flowers) embryonic leaves. It's not until the plant's first true leaves appear that you can begin to guess what the plant is, and that might be several days or even a couple of weeks.

When the true leaves appear, I'll be able to distinguish the smooth oval leaves of zinnias from the feathery leaves of larkspur. Telling a marigold from a tomato seeding, or a squash from a melon seedling, might take a little longer.

Knowing what was in this bed last year, I'm guessing that a fair number of these seedlings will turn out to be zinnias which I'll need to thin aggressively. There's some larkspur in this mix, too, and there are likely to be tomatoes considering how many wound up composting where they fell. And somewhere in there is the red okra I planted a couple of weeks ago.

Part of the fun for me is seeing what I wind up getting, and then trying to incorporate it into an attractive whole.