April Flowers

So, as I mentioned before, everything was going according to plan. The straw bales had been purchased and placed with care (more on this topic later). The seeds had likewise been purchased and started indoors. Though I couldn't necessarily tell what was what, (Rule#1 for next year: Carefully Mark Everything!), it was evident right away that my choice of medium (peat puck starter kit), location (giant, south-facing window), and seed source (Abundant Life Seeds) was a great combination for rapid and healthy growth. By around 2-3 weeks after sowing the seeds I noted the following:

Thriving (to put it mildly):

• All varieties of squash – can’t tell them apart (some summer squash, some pumpkin squash, some winter squash)
• Wax beans – only one variety, plants look great
• Japanese eggplant – 8 seedlings total sprouted, 4 are looking particularly vigorous

Not-So-Thriving:

• Tomatoes – can’t tell these apart either (black cherry tomatoes, kellogg’s breakfast beefsteaks)
• Cucumbers – could be some of them are mixed in with the squash (and therefore doing well) but I don’t think so...

So pretty much all seeds sprouted, but not all plants are doing great. My mother-in-law suggests fertilizing to help the tomatoes, so I plan to first transplant the seedlings into peat-pots (small planters that will be transplanted directly into the bales) and then fertilize with Miracle-Gro tomato fertilizer. I bought 36 peat-pots, had Lucas fill them 2/3 full each with a 50/50 mix of potting soil and composted manure, and then had to decide which seedlings made the cut.

The wax beans were easy. I had planned on having 18 plants in the garden so the 18 best looking moved on with only 5-6 missing the cut. The eggplants were straightforward as well. 4 of the 8 seedlings looked much better than the rest, so on they went. The cucumbers weren't hard to choose in the end either, as only two surviving seedlings could be positively identified by their remaining seed casings and therefore both went on to stage 2.

The squash and tomatoes presented a different problem in that I didn’t know which was which. I decided to go with 7 pots for tomatoes and 7 for squash, selecting only based on how healthy the plants appeared to be. This offered no guarantee that I would get a least one of each variety that I planned on, but what else could I do at this point? Live and learn for next year.

Cherry or beefsteak? Who knows?

After fertilizing, all plants did very well in their new pots – too well as it turns out. We have all heard the saying:

“April Showers Bring May Flowers”

Well as it turned out, my over-enthusiasm to get my garden started had brought on a very real problem: April Flowers.

All of the beans, most of the squash, and even a couple of the tomatoes and eggplant had started to flower. I knew instinctively that this couldn’t be good. Flowering is an essential step in a plant’s bearing fruit, but it also takes a considerable amount of energy from the plant. This energy loss could minimize the overall output for the plant once transplanted to the outside, even causing death from the shock of transplanting. And here it was, only the first week of April.

So I had a choice to make: Transplant early and risk a frost killing all (Beginning of May is considered safe where I live) or wait it out and risk having nothing left worth transplanting. I decided to wait as long as I could.

(Rule#2 for next year: Sow no seeds before the 3^rd week of March!)