Garden Update 5 2012

The fates smiled, in between torrential storms, my plants arrived! There was some doubt after after I realized that Fed Ex was only a middle man and the actual responsible party was the U.S Postal Service I had serious doubts that they were going to arrive before Wednesday.

Untested Veggie Vendor, AKA Totally Tomatoes came through.

When I order from Burpee I get six young plants, one plant per variety. I usually have to supplement with some local buys as well to fill out the garden. TT sent me a lot of plants. A lot of very young plants, so young that I believe that were planted the morning they were shipped.

I opened one of the boxes and was a little shocked. I had a total of sixteen tomato plants in four different varieties, all Brandy-wine variants. The other box held sixteen tiny bell pepper plants. The peppers were in much better shape.

How little? Each of these held four plants

Plants about the size of a library pencil. I have never bought a plant that small. And now I have have bought thrity-two plants that small. I have all ready lost one of the tomato seedlings - not really hdeart breaking as I never wanted quite so many tomatoe plants and wouldn't have them except that they were very cheap and I looked online and they can be frozen and they do make sauces from them. If even half of the plants live long enough to be productive I'm going to be swimming in tomaotes. I give a lot of them to a woman at work who loves tomatoes but I don't even think she can eat that many. I did some (late) research on the variety and apparently they aren't what I was looking for, these puppies are huge, upwards of a pound on the small ones. What was I thinking? January causes brain damage.

The picture is not great quality but in my defence it is currently both cold and raining and I don't have the desire to spend the time in the cold and rain to get the perfect picture. I went ahead and put cages up now because in the past I've waited andit doesn't end well. I learned to do it when I plant them, reguardless of how small the plants are.

For those of you keeping track I have Brandywines in black,red, yellow and pink.

Onto my real favorites, the peppers. They are also teeny plants but somehow, more butch teeny plants than the tomatoes. I have : Super Heavy Weight, Goliath, King Arthur and Gourmet and the Purple Beauties (6) I picked up at the Farmers Market because they were so good last year. I am going to have to get a bigger freezer.

The only thing I have left to plant are the marigolds, I discovered too many grubs when I was planting - I also learned all ready this year that next winter there will be no winter cover! The parts of the garden that had relatively light winter cover have a lot more worms and no grubs, while the area that had heavy coverage has many grubs and no worms. Worms are good, grubs are bad. Marigolds are a way to limit the damage from the grubs. And they're pretty and I like pretty, in the plant world they're like blonds with PhDs.

So this year I have  four kinds of potatoes, four kinds of tomatoes, five kinds of peppers, one variety of green beans, one of peas and one kind of watermelon.  Its kind of like having forty one pets.