Wow, it has been a cold and wet Spring so far. One week of lovely
weather, where my seedlings could finally go outside, and now here they are
again indoors as it gets down to 0 overnight. It would be nice if Summer would
finally arrive. That looks to be this week (fingers crossed)!
But the seedlings are doing well and that week in the warmer weather
outdoors helped. The tomatoes are large and the stems are strong even if they
are bending over a little. That is quite common, sometimes people put a stick
in the pot to tie them straight but I don’t bother. When you plant tomatoes out
into the garden, you want to plant them quite deeply anyways, much deeper than
they are in the pot. It encourages them to grow stronger root systems as they
can grow roots all along the buried stem. I plant them deep enough that only
one or two sets of leaves are still showing above ground, so if they bend over
a bit in the pot, it doesn’t matter in the end because that part of the stem
will be underground eventually anyways.The seedlings are back outside, as of today, to prepare for planting.
One more of the pepper varieties has grown properly, so I will have one
chili pepper and one sweet pepper this summer. I’m glad I have another, but am
still disappointed. The peppers whose seeds didn’t germinate well were
commercially bought, and I will be looking for a different seed source next
year. To have such poor germination, and across several varieties, doesn’t
speak well.
The onions are still small but growing. Only about half of them went
outside that week, but they actually perked up a lot, and the stems got
stronger. Once the weather warms again, they will all go outside and hopefully I
can rescue the onion seedlings even if they will be getting a late start!
Squash and Cabbage seedlings are already planted out into the garden,
as were the pea seeds and they seem to be surviving the dip in temperatures.
Potatoes were planted as well. Peas are already coming up! Half the tomatoes
are planted as well - they sulked in the unexpected cold but are starting to perk up a bit. I really need to get to the square of the garden where the
carrots and onions go, weed it, and get them in the ground ... those are
behind. Then the cucumbers, which are
huge and clearly need to get out of their pot and into the ground, and the rest
of the tomatoes and peppers.
Then I’ll have to move back to weeding the flower gardens. It always
amazes me that weeds can flower and go to seed before you can barely even get
out into the garden in the Spring. It makes it very difficult to keep up with.
I always start with the vegetable gardens because they need to be planted
early, but then the flower gardens need to be tended and I’ll be playing
catch-up. With the hard, freezing cold winter we had, there is a lot of die-back
and a lot of plants that didn’t make it, so there will be quite a bit of
clean-up and moving things around this year ... unfortunately.
