If you’ve read my previous entry, my seeds started on May 23rd…it’s
been three weeks and five days since my seeds were started.
My seeded inventory so far is: Mammoth Russian Sunflowers, California Wonder
Sweet Peppers, Bloomsdale Long-Standing Spinach, Evergreen Long White Bunching
Onions, Burpee’s Fordhook Zucchini’s, Connecticut Field Pumpkins, Jack O’
Lantern Pumpkins, Cherokee Purple Tomatoes, Box Car Willie Tomatoes and Romaine
Lettuce. The first batch of romaine
lettuce was harvested two days ago. The
zucchini, sunflowers and Jack O’ Lantern pumpkins look awesome! I can already picture myself roasting the
sunflower seeds! Um mmm! The bunching onions did not take off well and
only a few sprouted (barely). The
Connecticut Field Pumpkins are very slow to start, although the package states
I should have seen the emergence of a plant in up to two weeks, my second one
(out of eight) just emerged yesterday.
However these were old seeds, from 2011, that may have affected their
survival rate. And for some reason the
spinach did not sprout at all. I’m
shocked about the spinach as I have never had a problem in the past.
I had two seedlings too many of the zucchini and so they
have been donated to the Free Soil United Methodist Church for their community
garden. The community garden also helps
to feed some local families. I need to
thin out my tomato plants which will lead to more donations to the church.
I need spinach in my garden, so in light of the latest
lack-of-growth this means I’ll need to purchase seedlings. I will need to do some research to try to
figure out why they did not grow.
Although it could have been a bad batch of seeds, I want to make sure it
wasn’t something I did so as to not make that same mistake next year.
I have to mention the romaine lettuce because something very
interesting happened with them…I did not purchase or plant any romaine lettuce
seeds or seedlings. Guess where they came
from? Last year’s plants! I purchased four romaine lettuce plants last
year and planted them in a ground pot.
This made it easy for harvesting and weeding and allowed me to keep the
rabbits out of the tempting treat.
Apparently some lettuce seeds remained from last year and the lettuce
plants grew from those seeds. The ground
pot remained covered with feet upon feet of snow all winter and I did
absolutely nothing with the lettuce plants.
They simply grew on they own and already has grown some harvestable
leaves two days after the last picking.
I think this is awesome!
For one of the ground pots I purchased oregano, basil and
parsley. I got a wonderful deal, 50₵ per herb plant! I also purchased a four pack of Oregon Spice
tomato seedlings (again at a whopping 50₵ for four) for the Topsy-Turvy®. I
want to can my own spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce and salsa this fall and now I
have different types of tomatoes along with the spices to accomplish this.
At this point in the game, Mother Nature has thrown some
rather cool days and at times massive down pours. The cool days are not well received by the
tomato plants so they have “growth spurts” and then it stalls a little. The seedlings that just were not that big
undertook some hammering rain. Our weather
report states tomorrow will dry out and then Friday will have
thunderstorms. As long as we are not
having any crazy frost or a swarm of locust, I think they will be OK.
My routine so far has been to fertilize once weekly with an
organic fertilizer. When the plants grow
a little more and/or start producing fruit, I’ll increase the fertilizer to
twice weekly. They are too small to
prune or otherwise man-handle. I simply
make sure they are receiving the right amount of sunlight, water and fertilizer
and correct those three as needed.
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