19 May Weekly Update

Sugar snap, snow, and shelling peas

More of them

Harvests this week were: garlic scapes, sugar snap and snow peas (three times!), kale and mustard (twice), radishes, lettuce, shelling peas, dill, broccoli, the last of the overwintered cilantro growing in the porch boxes which had bolted (we put it through the juicing machine along with other good-for-you produce that we’ve been drinking for the past month or so), and Spring-planted cilantro which went into a carnitas-like dish we made.

Shelled Peas

Dill

Garlic Scapes, peas, broccoli, radishes

Kale & Mustards

And a second time

Last overwintered cilantro

Lettuces

Spring cilantro

The broccoli heads were rather small but we went ahead and cut them because they were on the verge of flowering (one had actually begun flowering).  The weather lately hasn’t been conducive to growing broccoli – it got quite hot really fast this week.  We actually woke up to 38 degrees on Monday morning and by Thursday morning the overnight low was 62.  Highs were in the mid-80s by the end of the week.  That’s quite a spread…  The broccoli harvest was the majority of the plants we have.  I think we have only 4 more very small heads in the garden.  We left the plants in their boxes though because the overwintered plants we harvested earlier this year kept producing a lot of offshoots.  Maybe these plants will too and since we don’t need the beds quite yet, there was no reason to remove the plants.

The garlic scapes will primarily be going into hummus since we’re trying to cut back on things like yummy cream cheese spread.

The asparagus seems to be done for the season.  As we mentioned in last week’s post, the asparagus bed has been a bit disappointing.  We expected to get much more asparagus for the number of crowns we planted.  We will likely plant some more crowns in the box next Spring.

We noticed a cabbage looper on one of the broccoli plants so we went ahead and sprayed all of the brassicas with BT after hand-picking the one caterpillar.  We also seeded one of the porch boxes with cilantro after removing the radishes that never wanted to bulb up (a common problem for us).  It’s getting a bit late for cilantro (which likes cooler weather) but since it’s on a porch that doesn’t get full sun all day, it might be OK.  We also seeded more “Bouquet” dill.  We grow two types of dill in containers (the other is “Tetra”) and most years, they reseed themselves and start growing again in Spring.  This year, only one Bouquet dill plant has started growing so I roughed up the surface a little, threw a few more seeds into the container, sprinkled some compost on top to cover the seeds, and patted it all down before watering.  Hopefully they’ll sprout!

Finally, we hardened off the last of the peppers in the basement for several days and planted them out on Friday.  For whatever reason, NONE of the various melon seeds we started indoors on April 21 have germinated.  We’re having a less-than-stellar success rate with seed starting this year!  We’re going to go ahead and purchase melon starts next month when the boxes they’ll be going in are open; right now, the various brassicas are occupying the future melon boxes.  Yes, we run season successions pretty tight in order to maximize the *potential* productivity of our garden.  (Actual productivity being a whole ‘nother matter entirely…).

Training tomatillos

Potatoes in Bloom

Onions

Lettuce Box

First Summer Squash Flowers – one is female

Eggplants

Training Cucumbers, blooming

Taqueria Style Pickled Carrots & Jalapenos

My good wife made up this recipe from her samplings of other similar pickles and from researching several different recipes.  We started making them because she’s originally from Southern California; when we go vacationing there and in Vegas she always wants to visit two of her favorite restaurants that make similar pickles - Tio Leo’s in San Diego and Roberto’s which seems to be all over San Diego and Vegas.  I highly recommend the mexican food at both places by the way, having been gleefully taken to them by my darling.  Leaving the strip in Vegas and driving out to find a Roberto’s in suburbia is still one of the highlights of one of our Vegas trips.

Finished Jars

From this point on, it’s all her.

(Can be adjusted proportionally for the amount you want to make – I like to make a big batch because they’ll keep for months in the refrigerator; they’re pickled, after all)

3 pound carrots (large ones, if you have them), sliced on the bias into ¼ inch pieces (I don’t peel the carrots, you can if you want)

½ to ¾ head of garlic, peeled and smashed (I used our frozen minced garlic this time because that’s what I had on hand – you’re just more likely to have a piece of garlic stuck to your carrot this way)

½ of a large sweet onion, diced into 1-inch pieces (more if you like pickled onions too)

10 – 12 whole bay leaves

1-2 tablespoons peppercorns (depends on how much you like pepper)

1 tablespoon Mexican oregano (can use regular Italian oregano if that’s what you have)

1 teaspoon salt

4 large jalapenos, sliced (no need to seed, unless you don’t really like any hotness to your food)

Olive oil – enough to cover bottom of saucepan

2-4 cups white vinegar

2-4 cups water

(The vinegar and water should be in a 50-50 proportion.  The amount needed will depend on how much you’re making and the dimensions of your saucepan.  Use enough to cover everything in your saucepan while simmering).

Directions:

Add the oil, garlic, onions, and peppercorns to a saucepan, heat to medium heat, and sauté until onions are translucent but not browned.  Add the carrots and jalapenos and sauté for 2-3 minutes, stirring often.  Add the vinegar, water, salt, oregano, and bay leaves and bring to a simmer.  Simmer for 20-25 minutes until the carrots are tender but still a little crisp on the inside.

Simmering Pickles

Ladle everything into quart-sized mason jars.  If you need more liquid to completely cover the food in the mason jars, boil more water and vinegar (50-50 mixture) to top off.  Let the jars cool a bit on the counter before refrigerating.

Keep refrigerated and use a fork or slotted spoon to serve.  Do not eat the bay leaves (but you can leave them in the jars as flavor enhancers).

12 May Weekly Update

We’re a bit worried about our slicing tomatoes.  The plants just don’t look very healthy.  First the lower stems looked a sickly green with some yellowing so I removed them since the plants had enough upper stems and you eventually want to remove any stems with leaves that touch the ground.  But then the next set of stems up the trunk started looking the same way.  They don’t look diseased, just sickly.  So I went to research it in one of my gardening books and concluded that the most likely problem was a nutrient deficiency of some sort.  I spread Azomite (see last week’s post for info on Azomite) generously among all the tomato plants, not just the sickly slicing ones, and gave them all a good fish emulsion bath early in the week.    But on Saturday, we decided to go ahead and replace the worst looking Early Girls with some purchased starts.  Tomatoes are one of the main reasons we garden and we want to make sure we have plenty this summer!!  If the Better Boys aren’t looking a lot better by next weekend, we’ll likely replace them as well.

Asparagus & First Sugar Snap Peas

Radishes

Sugar Snap & Snow Peas

Mustard and Kale

Harvests this week were: the first sugar snap peas and snow peas of the season!, kale and mustard (twice, for juicing), asparagus, and radishes.

The garlic is starting to make scapes.  We’ll soon have this once-a-year treat.  And several of the potatoes have flowered with many more blooms set and ready to flower soon.

Yukon gold potatoes – so tall they’ve started to topple over

Other garden tasks accomplished this week was a good bit of hand weeding in various boxes, raking up and redistributing the mulch that washed down the center aisles during heavy rains, reseeding some of the various seeds we’ve sowed lately that didn’t sprout, giving everything (including our various fruit trees/bushes) a fish emulsion bath, and researching/fretting over how we’re going to convert the wood boxes on the slope to some sort of masonry later this year.  We want to make sure we really like what we end up with since it’ll likely be permanent, or at least not trivial to change!

We also dealt with all of last year’s garlic heads that were stored in the basement.  This year’s crop will be harvested next month and we still had *many* heads from last year (at least 35 or so), many of which weren’t really good anymore.  So we peeled all of the good/pretty decent cloves and processed them in the food processor along with some olive oil.  We then transferred the minced mixture to a pint-sized freezer container and put it in the freezer for use as we need it – the olive oil should help it keep from freezing all the way so we can scoop out what we need.  We plan to start saving most of our garlic harvests this way in the future since the heads start to deteriorate quite a bit after being stored in the basement for a few months.  We’ll save out only the heads that we expect to use over 4 or 5 months (plus our seed for the next crop).  And we’ll likely be growing less garlic in the future as well.  We went through it really fast one year but I think our cooking has changed a bit since then and we just don’t use as much garlic in our cooking nowadays.

Some of you may have noticed a change in the countertop colors of our pictures – we recently had new countertops installed and we’re very happy with the result.  Here’s a picture of our “new” kitchen.

Kitchen

Yellow & Patty pan Squash, sweet peppers in lower box

Tomatillo Lanterns – even the partially broken one on the right keeps trying!

Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpillar on bolted Parsley

Cauliflower Plant

sad Better Boy tomatoes

newly planted Zucchini starts

Blueberry Bush with lots of blueberries forming!

happy Amish paste tomatoes, potatoes in box behind

Fig trees

A fig, forming

Cucumbers on Trellis with 1 ground-level bloom

Cabbage-Cauliflower-Sugar Snap Pea box

Broccoli in front yard box

5 May Weekly Update

Those Dang Voles!!

We continue to have vole predation despite our poisoning efforts.  They got about ½ of our Danver’s carrots and about ¼ of our Little Finger carrots.  We reseeded the Danver’s in the bare areas but it’s pretty late in the season for us to be seeding carrots.  We didn’t reseed the Little Fingers because we need that box for field peas before the carrots would mature.  The box the Danver’s are in is slated to be a Fall planting box so the carrots will have time to mature before we need it.  We are not amused with the voles.

Harvests this week were: a huge head of cauliflower (!!), beets and beet greens, kale, mustard, lettuce, asparagus, radishes, the last of the overwintered purple mustard, and mung beans sprouted using the mason jar method.

Asparagus & Mustard

Cauliflower, Kale & Beets

Mung Bean Sprouts

Radishes & Purple Mustard

Lettuce

When I pulled up the cauliflower plant after cutting off the head to take it over to the compost pile, I couldn’t believe how much it weighed!  At least 20 pounds.  The plant was huge.  Out of curiosity, I weighed the head:  3.23 pounds!  Wow!!  Since we’ve had so much cauliflower lately, I took to the internet to find some recipes and we made this on Saturday evening:  http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/cauliflower-curry  It was quite good so we wanted to share the link in case others are looking for some cauliflower ideas.  I wouldn’t exactly call it a “curry” in the way I think of curries, but the flavor was quite good.  Our only deviation from the recipe was that we decided to wedge and then roast the tomato before adding it to the dish.

I also went ahead and pulled up the beets since we need the bed they were growing in for hot peppers and I wanted to get to them before the voles did.  Only one of the beets could even be considered a real beet (as in size) and a few could be called “baby beets” but others were just nubbins.  Most of them are going into the juicer whole along with the greens, so we’re not unhappy with them.  But something that we are a bit disappointed in is the asparagus bed.  We expected to get much more asparagus from it than we have this year.  We planted 2 year old crowns in March 2011 so they’re 4 years old now.  Several of them must have died since a portion of the bed has produced no spears.  But I thought each crown would produce many more spears than we’ve gotten (we’ve cut only about 2 spears per crown – about ½ of the spears each crown has produced).  I’ll have to do some research to figure out if this level of production is typical or whether we have underachieving plants.

Transplanted Peppers

Other tasks accomplished this week were transplanting out the four eggplant (and covering them with a lightweight garden fabric until they are large enough to better withstand flea beetles) and butternut squash, starting another large container of parsley (we really like to make a chimmichurri sauce with it), fertilizing the garlic and onions with fish emulsion (we’re trying to be diligent about doing this every 3 weeks this year!), seeding basil, and planting out most of the pepper plants.  A few of the pepper plants are still in the basement until they size up a bit more.  We ended up purchasing a total of 12 pepper plants from the local garden center since our seed starting success this year could have been better.

Transplanted Butternuts

While browsing Southern States’ website for fertilizers, I discovered a product called “Azomite” which is an organic trace mineral product.  I went ahead and bought a 10 pound bag because it probably won’t hurt and might help.  10 pounds won’t quite do all of our boxes but it’ll do the vast majority.  Trace minerals are things that regular fertilizer doesn’t include so it may be something others may want to check out for soil improvement purposes.  Azomite has a website – just goggle the term.

 

Spring-planted leeks

Lettuce Patch

Half-runner beans

Broccoli head forming

 

28 April Weekly Update

Transplant casualties.

We lost one of our Amish Paste tomato plants to voles – they chewed off the roots and the plant wilted – and one of the tomatillo plants partially broke near the base of the plant.  I think it just couldn’t hold up to some windy conditions we had.  I stood it up and piled soil around it in the hope it might grow new roots since it wasn’t completely broken off.  Time will tell.  Later in the week those dang voles also got one of our cucumber plants.

Cilantro for Juicing

Leeks

Mound of Kale

Mustards & Cilantro

Greens & Parsley

Parsley, Cauliflower, & Cilantro

Radishes & Asparagus

Pickings were: kale and mustard (the large mound of kale in the picture is the leaves from the last two overwintered Red Russian kale plants which have now been removed; later in the week we also removed most of the overwintered purple mustard), parsley and cilantro (multiple times; removing almost all of our overwintered cilantro as the last picking), asparagus, a few small radishes, the overwintered leeks, and another head of cauliflower!  (Although this head of cauliflower was not nearly as large and perfect as the one we got last week).

We’ve been fairly busy in the garden.  The removal of overwintered stuff meant that more Spring crops were going in.  We seeded 2 zucchini seeds in the space the cilantro had been in.  Hopefully they’ll germinate since starting them in the basement last month failed dismally.  In the space the leeks had been growing, we seeded winter squash – both Long Island Cheese and Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck.  We also filled in some of the lettuce squares of types that didn’t germinate well with the seeds of other types of lettuce that are doing well.  I think I’m going to cull some seed packets soon…  Of course, after we remove plants, we work the boxes well and apply fertilizer so it’s *work* to get these tasks done!

Another big Cauliflower

The growth rates on the potato plants is impressive; they grew over a foot in the past week.  And three of our Spring-planted broccoli plants are forming the beginnings of a head!  I hope they’re able to produce decent heads before it gets too hot for them.  We started hardening off our pepper plants on Saturday and plan to plant them out later this week.  I keep looking anxiously at the places we seeded last week (various beans) but so far, nothing has broken ground.  Earlier in the week, I was delighted to see that our third overwintered cauliflower has formed a good sized head!  Three producing cauliflower plants is a first for us!

Asparagus Box

Azaleas in Bloom

Spring Cauliflower Plants

Celery Patch

Dill

Garlic Box

Hardening off Eggplant & Butternuts

Irises!

Marjoram & Sage

Pea Flowers!

Potatoes

Red Cabbages

tomatillos with Seeded Zuchinni

Garden

 

21 April Weekly Update

Cauliflower

Cauliflower Achieved!!!

Perhaps it’s the month of achievements with asparagus finally coming up last week and our second ever no-doubt-about-it bona fide head of cauliflower!  This is *by far* the largest head of cauliflower we’ve managed to grow in the five years we’ve been earnestly trying.  It was quite tasty.

Cauliflower, Cilantro, and Parsley

Other harvests this week were lettuce, cilantro, parsley, beets that weren’t ready but we needed the box for tomatoes (the beets in the picture went into the juicer whole), kale, mustard, two very small potatoes and several small carrots found while working boxes, four small radishes for salads, and a little bit of asparagus.  We would have had more asparagus but Ms. Foodgardenkitchen was out of town most of the week and Mr. Foodgardenkitchen was fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of when to cut the asparagus and he let them go far too long, thinking they would get thicker.  Once an asparagus spear comes up, it doesn’t get thicker with time, it just goes to fern if you don’t cut it early enough.  Once it starts to fern, you’ve waited too long.  We have quite a few ferned out spears in the asparagus box…

Beets, beet greens, and 2 found potatoes

First Asparagus

cilantro, Radishes & Carrots

Kales & Mustards for Juicing

Cilantro for Juicing

Lettuces

I was away for 5 days and it was absolutely amazing how much growth happened in all of the various plants we have in the garden in only 5 days.  It’s interesting how you don’t notice how much growth can occur in just a few days if you’re looking at the plants every day.

On Thursday we planted the tomato, tomatillo, and cucumbers that had been hardening off for the past few days.  We also started hardening off the starts in the basement that were ready for this next step of the process – some summer squash and more cucumber starts.  We’ve gotten very poor germination on the various winter squash we started inside.  At this point, we’re just going to try direct seeding but I don’t know what the problem is.  Ditto on zucchini germination success – zero out of 8 tries (with brand new seeds).  For some reason, we have a hard time getting zucchini to grow but yellow squash (and patty pans) aren’t a problem.

Tomatillos Planted Out – One has already bloomed

Transplanted Paste Tomatoes

Slicing Tomatoes Planted

Oregano

Overwintered Leeks – Ready for Harvest

First Pea Flowers

Cucumbers Transplanted

Carrots – No squinting this time

Broccoli & Peas

Cabbage, Cauliflower, and Sugar Snap Peas

Bolted Cilantro & 3 Transplanted tomatillos

On Saturday we seeded an area of lima beans (2/3 of a box; paste tomatoes are in the other 1/3), a full box of haricot vert, a trellis-wide row of Old Dutch Half Runner beans, and 4 butternut squash seeds (we have 2 butternut squash starts in the basement which we’ll begin hardening off soon; we’re trying for 6 plants).  And on Sunday we started various melon seeds in the basement – hopefully we’ll have some success with these!

First Iris

Apple Tree in Bloom

 

14 April Weekly Update

Asparagus Achieved!!! 

Asparagus

When we went out to the garden Wednesday after work (after having to skip Tuesday due to work commitments), 3 small spindles of asparagus were about 4 inches tall.  We breathed a sigh of relief.  “Kitsap” at Modern Victory Garden was likely correct in her supposition that the soil just hadn’t warmed up consistently enough yet when I was expressing concern a couple of weeks ago.  The soil is definitely warming up now.  By mid-week, temperatures were consistently in the lower- to mid-80s during the day.  As often happens in North Carolina, it seems like we went from winter to summer in one week.  This is why certain spring crops can be difficult to grow here – it heats up too quickly for plants that need a longer cool period.

Kales, mustard, beet greens

We harvested twice this week.  The first time we cut some kale and cilantro which we used with our new contraption – a juicer!  We’re going to be drinking more of our veggies more often.  The second cutting was more kale and cilantro along with some beet greens and mustards.

Kale & cilantro

Plants are officially bursting forth from the soil.  Potatoes, peas, lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, raspberries, greens, onions, garlic, and various herbs are all putting energy into growing.  The overwintered Red Winter kale is bolting in the heat, plus it’s just at the end of its life-cycle.  We dug around in all the leaves of one of the overwintered cauliflower plants and discovered it is forming a beautiful, white head!  It’s about four inches across already.  This is very exciting as cauliflower has been one of our nemeses (I had to go look up the plural of nemesis!).  Hopefully the other two surviving plants are forming heads as well.

Snow peas being trained

Spring planted mustard and kale

Potatoes in front yard box

 

Raspberries leafing out

Bolted Kale

Fig tree leaves!

Blueberries leafing out with our geriatric dog behind

We started hardening off the tomatoes, tomatillos, and some of the cucumbers on Friday.  They’ll get planted out later in the week.  I’m waiting on the remainder of the cucumber starts to get a bit larger before putting them out – they were the Round 2 batch after I didn’t have the best germination on Round 1.  Fortunately, the many peppers that we up-potted recently are looking much happier in their new digs.  I have hope they’ll all survive now!

 

Tulips!

Apple Tree Leafing

 

April 7 Weekly Update

Beets after the vole attack

Those dang voles!  They got almost every beet that was starting to size up and a few other things here and there – like eating the roots off of one of our last remaining heads of lettuce.  It had wilted by the time I figured out what happened so it went into the compost pile.  Warfarin was dumped into various vole holes in an attempt to poison the little turds while hopefully not poisoning other animals.

Fuzzy cabbage straight to flower

One of the overwintered cabbage plants went straight to flowering without even attempting to form a head so it was pulled up and the other plant that had formed a small but firm head was harvested.  (Sorry about the fuzzy pic – I discovered later the camera lens needed cleaning).  Also picked this week was parsley and cilantro which went into homemade hummus.

cilantro, cabbage, and parsley

By mid-week things were looking like they were picking up in the garden as temperatures began to slowly warm.  The snow peas in particular grew a few inches this week and the newest transplants (broccoli, kale, cabbage, etc.) have also sized up a noticeable amount in the past week.

Celery hardening off

The tomato, tomatillo, and celery seedlings in the basement are looking quite good!  As a matter of fact, we started hardening off the largest celery plants late in the week and planted them out on Sunday as the forecasted temperatures are looking very favorable.  I’m not willing to take a chance with the tomato and tomatillo seedlings though – they’re not as hardy as celery.  We also up-potted the eggplant seedlings on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the pepper seedlings aren’t looking as great.  They just don’t look very strong and 4 or 5 have actually died after coming up (this is the first time that has happened to us – in past years, if the seed germinated, the plant survived); and it’s pretty much all the various varieties, not just one or two.  My best guess is that there is some sort of disease problem (likely damping off) since I noticed that the one 6-cell pot of “overflow peppers” that were in a tray with different plants is looking healthy in all 6 cells (2 different types of peppers).  So I decided to up-pot all of the peppers to get them out of potentially diseased soil, pots, or trays.   I also went ahead and started a few more pepper seeds in the hopes of getting the type and number of plants we want.

Other garden tasks tackled included general weeding, keeping the various outside germinating seeds moist (I usually water them every other day), and fertilizing the onion and garlic plants with fish emulsion.

Happy gardening!  It looks like Spring is finally here to stay for us.  And I’m *really* hoping to see some asparagus soon…

Will the overwintered cauliflower actually produce a head or just a lot of leaves?

Tomatoes & Tomatillos

Sad Peppers, with nice Eggplants

Onions

Lettuces germinating

Garlic

First potatoes breaking the ground!

Carrots Germinating – Ok, Look Closer

Broccoli & Peas

Broccoli

31 March Weekly Update

Lettuces

It was a pretty quiet week in the garden.  Harvests were similar to last week:  parsley & cilantro for a homemade soup, lettuce for salads, and greens for braising.  I’m concerned that the asparagus has died since it’s past time for it to start growing and we have nothing yet.  The peas also are not germinating well and those that have started growing are taking their time about really getting started.  Maybe it’s just not going to be a good pea year.  Although we had a pretty mild winter (which means “ugh” for bugs this summer, but also that things overwintered well), it hasn’t warmed up much this spring either.  On a positive note, the radishes, carrots, and lettuces we sowed on March 3 are now germinating.

Greens

On Sunday, we re-started some of the seeds in the basement that we don’t have enough of or that were recently started by just haven’t germinated well.   This included a variety of sweet and hot peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and summer squash.  The summer squash were started two weeks ago and we have zero germination on 3 different types.  Just weird.  Squash normally comes up pretty fast.  The other starts mentioned have had some success but we want to make sure we end up with enough plants.  We also started our winter squash inside on Sunday (15 starts of 3 types – all C. moschata genus which stands up to squash vine borers (SVB) better than the C. pepo and C. maxima genuses).  We’ll wait until mid-April to start our melons inside because, since they need very warm temperatures to grow well outside, they get planted out much later (probably the end of May).

Cilantro & Parsley

Other small tasks done over the weekend were sowing some leaf lettuce in a box that had a little bit of space, sowing more radishes, and removing all of the remaining leaf mulch from the garlic.  We also removed the two overwintered Lacinato kale plants that wanted to flower – many of the braising greens in the picture are from these two plants.

24 March Weekly Update

On Thursday afternoon we were out doing the cover routine!  We weren’t expecting to have to do it again this season but with a low of 22 forecast, we didn’t have much choice.  The forecast also caused us to wait on planting the additional cauliflower, cabbage, and leeks out.  We waited until Saturday to plant them into their designated boxes.  We also went ahead and sowed some more pea seeds in the spaces they did not germinate.

On Saturday when we removed the burlap from our most recent transplants, we discovered a young bunny had taken up residence under the cover.  I think I was more startled than the bunny when I saw him!  I stood there contemplating what to do and decided to cover up a portion of the box until the bunny ran away (I didn’t want our dog to notice the bunny).  When I started moving the burlap back into place, the bunny apparently decided this was just too much action and it took off into some plant cover about 30 feet away.  Fortunately, our geriatric dog who doesn’t hear so well anymore didn’t notice.

Cilantro, parsley & lettuce

Harvest this week was just parsley and cilantro that went into a seafood soup and some lettuce.  Still no asparagus…

Basement light set-up

Sunday brought a cold, steady rain all day so we decided to up-pot the tomato, tomatillo, and celery starts since they needed to be done and it was a task that could be done in the basement.  Since fewer pots per tray mean more trays, it necessitated getting the second set of lights and heat mats on the lower level of the shelving unit going as well.

Lettuce box on porch railing

Radishes coming up in porch box

Early in the week I discovered the probable reason germination on some stuff has been slow – I had mistakenly plugged the heat mats into the power strip that is on a timer so they were on only 12 hours a day (on the cycle with the lights).  The heat mats have now been plugged into a strip that’s always on and within two days many more seeds, especially peppers, had germinated.

Snow peas, slowly but surely

Cauliflower, transplanted

Up-potted Celery

Up-potted tomatoes – some transplant shock