I went over to WOG this morning, and made the usual rounds. Watered the babies in the bedroom - it's still too cold to put them out; hopefully it will warm up soon. I also watered the strawberries and raspberries. The raspberries are looking good, and so are most of the strawberries. Sadly, some of the strawberries are severely wilted - possibly because of inadequate or damaged roots - and may die. But on the bright side, their brethren will fill in the gaps within the next couple of seasons, if any do die.
The peas are coming in strong, more every time I look. This is fantastic news - I adore peas. The only problem is figuring out when to remove the anti-cat netting, and how. And when I do, how will we keep the beets and carrots protected? Ah, well. I suppose we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The biggest news of the day is more onion issues. I gently dug out three wilty-looking red onions to see how their bulbs were doing, and discovered blue mold spots on all of them. This is not good! I did some research, and it turns out this is a soil-borne disease, and can exist in the soil on decaying plant matter - I find this unlikely, since we bought fresh soil - but it can also be introduced by infected onion sets. In my humble opinion, this is most likely what happened. I suppose I have only myself to blame - I bought cheap onion sets from a roadside stand, and didn't inspect them all that thoroughly. Well, live and learn, as they say. Next year, maybe we'll be able to start the onions from seed and avoid that whole problem. Or we could save seed from one of these onions, if any of them actually make it that far. I have hope, however! Almost all of the remaining onions are vigorous, with long, bright green leaves.
I also did some weed scouting today. I refuse to get behind on weeding! It was worth looking, too - I was able to pretty much sweep the weed seedlings (I find it fun to call them "weedlings") out of the soil, since they were pretty much all still at the white thread stage. There were a lot of them! And now we're already ahead of the game, in terms of weedlings. I'll have to make a habit of this, in addition to watering and scouting for diseases.
Well, that's all for today! Thanks for reading.
WOG out.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Updates Galore
Only a few updates this week.
On Tuesday, I went to WOG to water and check up on things (as I usually do) and was watering the pea patch, when I noticed that some seedlings were coming up! We have baby peas!! This was especially exciting because we'd more or less given up on the peas as a lost cause - they had been in the ground for a few weeks, with no sign of life, and peas should be relatively quick to sprout. As mentioned in a previous post, we think the problem was that they weren't getting enough water. Well, we remedied that, and the result was some babies! So now we're trying to do a much better job of watering everything daily, or almost daily.
This strategy seems to have worked well, because either some beets or some carrots are also coming up. I think the leaves are more beetlike than carrotlike, but I suppose we won't really know for sure for a while, because the cats messed up the row markers a while back and I had to guess the exact location of each row. Hopefully the other crop, whichever it is, will come up soon as well. The remaining onions, the ones that didn't have Fusarium, are looking swell - only a few red onions are a little puny, and hopefully they'll catch up.
The raspberries look great. I think all of them have new leaves on them now. Hooray! We'll have plenty of delicious berries in a couple of months :) The strawberries look excellent, too - most of the blossoms have opened, I think, which is great news for yield. Of course, we'll only be getting a few berries out of them, but I bet they'll be scrumptious. And next year we'll have plenty of strawberries to go around.
The babies that are still in the coldframe are looking all right. Some of the eggplants and peppers are clearly stressed, probably because it's been chilly recently. We brought them into the house yesterday, because it was supposed to be cold last night (and it was).
The babies in the apartment are looking spectacular. On Chris' recommendation, I put them in the windowsills of the bedroom (it gets the best light, generally), and have just left them there, watering about every other day. I wrapped the curtains around the other side so that the white fabric would reflect some light back down on the babies, as well as create a little greenhouse-like microclimate in each window. This has helped reduce some of the etiolation that was going on, especially with the tomatoes.
The baby broccoli in the windows desperately need to be transplanted into individual pots. I haven't done so yet because I've been worried about the cold weather. The plan was to do that today, but the high is still only going to be about 47. I could transplant them and put them in the WOG house bedroom, but I'm concerned that the cats might bother them. I will wait it out for a couple more days and hope the weather improves.
I still have yet to contact either local autobody to see if they can donate a few tires to us for potato-growing purposes. I need to get on that and get those babies in the ground soon!
Yesterday, Chris and I went to the Starter Barter in Avogadro's Number restaurant. Most of what people had to offer were tomatoes, and I didn't buy any of them, because I think WOG's neighbor plans to give us some of his starts that he's not going to use - plus, we've sprouted our own, and I want to see how they turn out. We did buy two more hot pepper plants from Drew - one Ancho and one Santa Fe. They are looking good, and hopefully they'll stay that way. We also got two green cabbage plants and one red cabbage plant, as well as five garden huckleberry plants and one wonderberry plant. I do enjoy experimenting with new crops! Hopefully they turn out well. I wonder where we'll put them all - space will be a little tight! But we'll manage, and we can always give some seedlings away.
All in all, this week has been somewhat eventful and vastly encouraging, since the peas and either beets or carrots started to come up. I can't wait to put more plants in the garden! Thanks for reading.
WOG out.
On Tuesday, I went to WOG to water and check up on things (as I usually do) and was watering the pea patch, when I noticed that some seedlings were coming up! We have baby peas!! This was especially exciting because we'd more or less given up on the peas as a lost cause - they had been in the ground for a few weeks, with no sign of life, and peas should be relatively quick to sprout. As mentioned in a previous post, we think the problem was that they weren't getting enough water. Well, we remedied that, and the result was some babies! So now we're trying to do a much better job of watering everything daily, or almost daily.
This strategy seems to have worked well, because either some beets or some carrots are also coming up. I think the leaves are more beetlike than carrotlike, but I suppose we won't really know for sure for a while, because the cats messed up the row markers a while back and I had to guess the exact location of each row. Hopefully the other crop, whichever it is, will come up soon as well. The remaining onions, the ones that didn't have Fusarium, are looking swell - only a few red onions are a little puny, and hopefully they'll catch up.
The raspberries look great. I think all of them have new leaves on them now. Hooray! We'll have plenty of delicious berries in a couple of months :) The strawberries look excellent, too - most of the blossoms have opened, I think, which is great news for yield. Of course, we'll only be getting a few berries out of them, but I bet they'll be scrumptious. And next year we'll have plenty of strawberries to go around.
The babies that are still in the coldframe are looking all right. Some of the eggplants and peppers are clearly stressed, probably because it's been chilly recently. We brought them into the house yesterday, because it was supposed to be cold last night (and it was).
The babies in the apartment are looking spectacular. On Chris' recommendation, I put them in the windowsills of the bedroom (it gets the best light, generally), and have just left them there, watering about every other day. I wrapped the curtains around the other side so that the white fabric would reflect some light back down on the babies, as well as create a little greenhouse-like microclimate in each window. This has helped reduce some of the etiolation that was going on, especially with the tomatoes.
The baby broccoli in the windows desperately need to be transplanted into individual pots. I haven't done so yet because I've been worried about the cold weather. The plan was to do that today, but the high is still only going to be about 47. I could transplant them and put them in the WOG house bedroom, but I'm concerned that the cats might bother them. I will wait it out for a couple more days and hope the weather improves.
I still have yet to contact either local autobody to see if they can donate a few tires to us for potato-growing purposes. I need to get on that and get those babies in the ground soon!
Yesterday, Chris and I went to the Starter Barter in Avogadro's Number restaurant. Most of what people had to offer were tomatoes, and I didn't buy any of them, because I think WOG's neighbor plans to give us some of his starts that he's not going to use - plus, we've sprouted our own, and I want to see how they turn out. We did buy two more hot pepper plants from Drew - one Ancho and one Santa Fe. They are looking good, and hopefully they'll stay that way. We also got two green cabbage plants and one red cabbage plant, as well as five garden huckleberry plants and one wonderberry plant. I do enjoy experimenting with new crops! Hopefully they turn out well. I wonder where we'll put them all - space will be a little tight! But we'll manage, and we can always give some seedlings away.
All in all, this week has been somewhat eventful and vastly encouraging, since the peas and either beets or carrots started to come up. I can't wait to put more plants in the garden! Thanks for reading.
WOG out.
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