Planting!

Finally, the plants are in the ground.  I'm so anally organized about this that I made a map ahead of time  to keep it all straight. (see Map page).

Prepping the garden

This past week I dug up a 7x12 foot plot in the backyard, about 4 inches deep.  To do that I had to cut up dense bermudagrass sod (but that means it's a sunny spot).  It was sort of good and bad;  I didn't want to just till up the grass because it grows so aggressively from the roots, so I cut out the sod and got rid of it (mainly dumped in the way-back part of the yard out of sight).   At least that should reduce the rate of grass growing back up. 

So in the end I had Lowes deliver 10 bags Black Kow 50 lb bags, 3 cu ft peat moss, and 3 large bags of garden soil.  I estimated this to be about 20 cu ft total.  This wound up being slightly less than optimal to fill the 7x12 space I dug out, but workable.  25-30 cu ft would have been just about right!     Thee peat moss should acidify the soil a bit, which tomatoes are actually supposed to like.    This was probably about 700 pounds of material.   The neighbors' hand power tiller was useful to break up the soil before adding the stuff, and then to mix it up some more.

Transplants be growin'

By about 2 weeks ago, I have transplanted about 30-40 seedlings into 5 inch biodegradeable fiber pots.  Around this time I treated the plants with Actinovate.  I set up a growlight after they had germinated, but now I have about 5 trays of stuff crowded around the light!

Most are now growing nicely to a few inches tall.  I put several of the trays of pots outside for a few days this week to harden off.    

Secondary leaves

All varieties now have secondary leaves and are 1.5-3 inches tall mostly. Ready to transplant to larger pots. I will do 5 inch pots.

All varieties have germinated

All varieties have multiple sprouts.  Coyote now has 2.

It will probably be an other week or two till true leaves appear - then they can be moved to 3 inch pots.  plant up to the cotyledon leaves.  ~april 1?

More sowing

I planted a few more seeds for the varieties that seemed to have few sprouts. All heirlooms were sowed at ~2 seeds per cup; a few were reseeded when they failed to germinate well.  Better boy is a hybrid sowed at 1 seed per well, but seemed to have about 100% germination.    Also, a few seedlings were killed by joshua stomping into my trays, and a couple by mildew, but overall mildewing was not much of a problem.

Heirlooms germinating

All heirlooms already germinating except Coyote.   Note how much faster they germinate with the heat pad - 4 days, while the previous Better Boy seeds took 2 weeks without the heat pad.