Potting Tomatoes

Bunny

While I was out doing yardwork, we had a visitor!  Cute little guy was munching away on clover and dandelion heads.  Who was I to stop him?

  

   

Potting Tomatoes

We've had moderate success with potting tomatoes in the past.  I decided to do it again.

Right:  Here are the containers Mom let me I decided to use, along with the tomato seedlings (one of each kind) and a cage in the background.  One of the containers had had a plant in it, so I had to take the soil out first.

Since the drainage holes were so big, I filled the bottoms in with coconut mulch, about two inches.

 

Then some perlite to fill in some gaps...

I picked up this "Flower & Vegetable Garden Soil PLUS" by CIL a while back.  I had mistaken it for compost at the time, and was excited by the fact it had helpful bacteria in it.  Oh well!  Add soil on top of perlite-mulch mixture.

 

Add perlite on top of soil.

Mix to distribute perlite.

Transplant tomatoes.

Install cages.  Fertilise if necessary.  Water.  Done!

Flower Planter

Remember that Agastache Cana I pinched back?  Looks like it's doing very well!

 

I decided to pinch back the central plant, too.

 

Garden Bed

There were all these dandelion seed puffs floating around today.  I saw a cloud of them about half the size of my palm!  Some of them made it through the netting over the 3x16 bed.  I'd rather pluck out seedlings later than deal with the fluff now.

 

Aw, poor nasturtium seedling...  Those leaves just couldn't handle the change from the warm plastic bottle greenhouse.  But it's tough, it'll live :).

OH HEY IS THAT A ZUCCHINI FLOWER??  AWESOME!

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Bad Plans

Remember how I had set aside this (right) space for my new lawn comprised of creeping thyme?  Well, it turns out that the soil is really sandy and rocky and that makes me think it was mixed that way on purpose.

So I found a new spot close to my 3x16 bed.

My plan is to let the creeping thyme establish itself, with some Shasta daisies and snow-in-summer thrown into the mix.  We'll see how it goes this year.  If it goes well, I'll be extremely happy!  If not, well, I lost four bucks.  Oh well.

I dug out a square.  You can see our famous "Manitoba" or "Red River" gumbo.  I threw in some perlite because it looked so sad.

Here's the creeping thyme:

I pulled the root ball apart, trying to get as close to half as possible but one ended up bigger.

Half went into one corner, half into the opposite corner.

Filled back up with topsoil; sprinkled seeds for Shasta daisies and snow-in-summer, and put up a pentagonal fence around the patch.  Hopefully I can convince my dad to avoid it.

And in that old spot I had saved?  I planted my clover.  Nyaha, I'm terrible.

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Yard Scraps = Future Compost

The lawn is infested with weeds.  But Mom and Dad are too old to want to weed, and I don't particularly care about dandelions, clover, bird vetch, peppergrass, or most of the "weeds" we have.

However, I strongly care about sow thistle!!

Right: I stole this picture of a sow thistle leaf from the Internet.

It looks something like dandelions, but the leaves are hairy and pokey.  When mature, it has small dandelion-like flowers.  I hate accidentally walking through or sitting on it, and getting pricked.


When we got our topsoil delivered, Dad decided it would be a great idea to dump some soil around our spruce tree.  I understand that topsoil has nutrients in it, but this grade of soil also came with a bunch of weeds.  Also, seeds will germinate in it.  It is so embarrassing to have weeds growing in spruce-needle mulch in your front lawn.


So I decided to get rid of as much thistle as I could find, and add them to my compost bin!

Right:  Thistles and some humongously overgrown dandelions that I found here and there.  Also, gloves from Canadian Tire, a Fiskars weeder and my shameless Cutco scissors.

Dad is paranoid about weed roots growing back, so I cut the roots up into tiny pieces about 1cm long.

Leaves and roots:

Bucket of leaves:

We also have these stupid tree-weeds.  I can't stand them, they're so hard to get rid of.  So I raged on them a little today, and managed to pull some roots out.  Score!  These will go into my new leaf mold, into which I'm also adding wooden wastes, since I'm going to let it sit for a year or two anyway.

Corn was on sale at the store, so I got to add lots of kitchen scraps to my compost heap!  This is the second bucket:

Cutting it up to speed up the process:

I dug a hole down the sort-of middle of the heap.  Near the centre, you can really feel the heat coming out of here.  In my arbitrary rummagings, I came across a big juicy centipede and about five earthworms.  I'm proud!

To my surprise, I discovered a patch of grass that was still dry and hard!  In the picture, it's the pale patch near the centre.  I quickly pulled up as much dry grass as I could find, and wetted it down with water before pouring in the corn husks.

I'm so excited for the compost to be ready!

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Mystery Flower!

Remember this mystery flower I found near where I store my cocopeat and coconut fibre mulch? 

Well, after a little (lots!) research, I found a flower that bears a similarity!

The above flower is a "Menna" cultivar of Streptocarpus.  I must find out more...

The Streptocarpus is a fairly new introduction as a houseplant and because there is not a wide information base on these plants new terminology is being introduced to describe them.

--Wikipedia article for Streptocarpus 

Lovely.

But this does make some sense!  "Streps" are native to South Africa.  Coconuts can be found, well...

[Coconuts] are now almost ubiquitous between 26°N and 26°S except for the interiors of Africa and South America.

--Wikipedia article for Coconut 

Actually here's a picture showing coconut distribution throughout the world (the strip bound by the red lines):

So it's quite possible the five-petalled white flower with purple veins in my back yard came all the way from Africa!  Neat!

A quick Google image search for "Streptocarpus seedling" gives these useful hits:

  

Now that I have an idea what the leaves (or in this case, leaf) looks like, I'll take a closer look at this spot in the morning (maybe there are more!).  For now, to bed!

Oh, my offer to contact me if you recognise my flower still stands.

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Planting at Last!

Looks like my Ice Cave worked!

Since we've had frost warnings (last night it got down to -3C) for the past two days, my gardening had been delayed to today.  From here on, it looks like we'll be upwards of 5C, which means everything can go out!  I was out most of the day, so I started gardening around 17:00.

Right:  We had a visitor today! Actually, bunnies are fairly commonplace, I just rarely have my camera accessible when I see them.

Plants now in the 3x16 bed:

• 2x Cherry Tomato - Hybrid
• 2x Cherry Tomato - Sun Sugar
• 4x Tomato - Stupice
• 3x Genovese Basil
• 3x Purple Basil
• 2x Marigold
• ?? Chamomile
• ?? Dill
• 2x Zucchini
• 1x Butternut
• 1x Pumpkin - Small Sugar
• approx 9x Red Onion sets
• ?? Snow Peas
• ?? Snap Peas
• ?? Nasturtium
• ?? Sweet Peas (flower)

I found a few sweet peas that had germinated!  Success!  I put two plants on the border between the Squash and Tomato sections.  

 Thankfully the bunnies haven't found this little treasure yet! 

This is the nasturtium that had been living in the plastic bottle.  I moved it over to the squash section.  Looks like it didn't handle the cold very well.  Oops.

The other nasturtium seems to be doing well, though!

Squashes!  From left to right: Zucchini, zucchini, butternut, pumpkin.

   

I moved the dill off to the side.  

Chamomiles are doing pretty well!

HOLY CRAP A SURVIVING PEA!

I transplanted the tomatoes, leaving one foot between plants, and putting in a 4' length of 2"x2" as a stake.  This is my first year staking tomatoes, rather than caging them.  Hopefully it will be successful!  From left to right:  Hybrid cherry tomato, Sun Sugar cherry tomato, Stupice tomato.

  

Between each pair of tomatoes and about a foot forward, I made a little hill on which I planted basil.

I'm not sure if the "hill" idea will work.  This is my way of providing the drainage and poor soil that basil thrives on, since my tomatoes will have a fertiliser spike each.  I figure the fertiliser will wash downward with water, so the basil won't be affected by it.

Hopefully, the mound will catch more sunlight, providing light to the leaves and heat to the soil.  Hopefully?  We'll see!

I used remaining plastic bottles to cover the basils.  The mounds look like breasts with nipples.

    

Oh hey, an onion!  I found about nine of these; dug them up and put them all together.  I hope they mature, because it's way too late to sow more sets.

 

So there we have it, my 3x16 bed!  

Now onto the 3x6 bed!  Not much has changed since.  More lettuce germinated--some in the broccoli's mulch, actually!  Strange,I thought mulch was supposed to prevent that.  Oh well!

Here's some spinach, getting true leaves.  ...  They don't look like true leaves to me, but it's in the Spinach section, so...I really hope it's spinach!

 

Some carrots!

 

Some lettuces/mesclun:

  

This was with my Nutri Red carrots...  I'm not sure what it is.  We'll see!

I used a square foot to transplant three pairs of parsley.  ...  I hope they make it.

And I used another square foot for oregano and tarragon.  Here's the oregano:

 

So it turns out I had another broccoli; I took out the weakest broccoli and put this one in its place:

Here's where the creeping thyme and the beginnings of my flowering groundcover will start!

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