One step forward, two steps back

My garden is growing, so painfully slowly but surely. Too slow for me. Much slower than the basil seedlings that my dad gave me. Those are doing great. I will be planting more seeds tomorrow. Some that I bought at Marc's, and some that I got from my dad from his basil plants from last year. I can never have enough basil. Here's my baby tomato plants. I'll have to transplant these soon.

Here is my pallet garden. See the seedlings coming up? The basil in the bottom right corner is from the Tremont Farmer's market that I potted.

Here's an up-close shot of the seedlings. If anyone wonders if there are toxins in pallets, my husband says that the wood from these is not treated lumber. It's not treated at all.

Well, I was so excited that I put mesh over my strawberry patch only to find my method faulty. You see, I was hoping that the mesh alone would be a wonderful detractor of those pesky robins only to find they outsmarted me. Boogers. :/ I draped the mesh over some metal garden decorative posts, about 1.5 feel long each, and each are at least 2 feet apart. Not much structure to it. Then the mesh lamely draped over to the back of the "patch". The robins just step on it until they get their desired strawberry and mutilate it. So now I have to resort to picking the strawberries when they're not quite ripe, and ripen them on my windowsill. I didn't get a picture of the patch, but here's a picture of the strawberries I had to salvage before the robins got to them (and my dad's beautiful basil):

Other than that, it's been raining here and I can't get to more planting. There's not much maintenance at this point. I'm still waiting for things to grow!

I'm going to have to play the "thinning of the plants" by ear (or do a web search). I have no clue what is appropriate spacing for each vegetable. I think I still have the seed packs to refer to. Those don't say enough for a newbie farmer like me.