Peas

I was just looking back at the post before last; in those pictures the peas are about 18" high. They are twice as high now, I'll get a picture later and put it up.

8 is enough

Planted the last tomatoes in the garden tonight. Now there are eight tomatoes.

Sweet 100
Lemon Boy
Viva Italia
San Marzano
Brandywine Red
Red Zebra
Zhongshu #4
Bloody Butcher

I also put in two peppers tonight (one bell and one Jap). I just have another Jap and a bunch of herbs and I will be about done with the garden.

First pea blossom today.

Blossoms

The big plants have blossoms!







Tomato volunteers (spontaneously sprouted from seed)



Peas



Chive flowers

Paydirt

On May 21st we planted out our first 4 tomatoes!

Here are the candidates



The plants in big pots are 59 days old in this picture; the little plant (San Marzano) is 44 days.

A hole 'to China'



Filled with good stuff




Nice roots (sweet 100)



Lemon Boy on left, sweet 100 on right



Roma on left, San Marzano on right




You can see that the sun was set by the time we got them all squared away. It felt really good to see them in the ground.

More Plants in big pots + all tomato names

Took the training wheels off of 8 more plants tonight. Now there are 22 plants in large pots.

Someone asked about which plants we have; here is the whole list of what we have growing:

Better Boy
Bloody Butcher
Brandywine
Container Choice
Early Girly
Lemon Boy
Red Zebra
Roma (Viva Italia)
San Marzano
Sweet 100
Tiny Tim
Zhongshu #4

Going to let the babies sleep outside tonight

There are now 14 plants in large pots that have been spending their days outside and their nights in the garage.

Tonight is supposed to be mild so they are going spend the first night ever in the elements!

Potting up again

The day finally came and we potted up the largest plants another time. We put them into 3 quart pots (trivia fact, this size pot is sometimes referred to as a gallon pot by some people).

I spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over whether to do this and when and such. Many experience gardners advise against going to such big pots and in hindsight I am starting to see their point. It is a relatively expensive thing to do with the cost of the larger pots and the potting mix. It is also unwieldly to have the plants in the big pots and impractical to have them under lights once they are.

All of that said, we started too early and the plants need to wait at least 2-3 more weeks until they get planted outside and they were outgrowing their pots.

We got a good deal on a big stack of pots and two different types of potting soil. The first soil is Miracle Grow mix and the other is MetroMix 830.

We selected the 8 largest plants and put half of them into miracle grow and the other half into the MetroMix.

*Pix*

The jungle (before)



Materials


First Plant






Stripping the lower branches (gasp)



Colin watering a new plant



The 8 plants take their first trip outside



Now that they are done they look kind of little in their new pots. The weather has been crummy the past few days including today. We had them outside for a few hours this morning and an hour or so tonight (the sun actually came out for a while). The rest of the time they were in their new home in the garage.

There are probably 8 more plants that will need bigger pots and the rest can hopefully survive in the size that they are in now.