First Blossoms! Really!

This is ridiculous. It's only the first week of May, and my tomatilla is already sporting its first blossom of the year. It wants to start fruiting! What?

Sure is pretty though, to see life working so hard like that. God did a good job when he invented life!

And then this tomato gets in on it, with three blossoms! Wow!

The curious thing: this tomato is doing better than any others. But this tomato is a weed! I didn't plant it; it just decided it wanted to grow where I was trying to sprout some lemon grass seed. I have no idea what kind of tomato it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's Early Girl.

Jackpot

I visited a local wholesale nursery. Got a bunch of 20 gallon pots for free! Woohoo!

Putting Starts Out

Got a chance last weekend to put some starts out. Here's the squash:

• PattyPan
• German Pumpkins (saved seeds)
• Carnival Squash (saved seeds)
• Golden Nugget
• Zucchini
• Crookneck squash

And if it's going to be 85 stinking degrees, then there's no reason in the world not to put out the Sunflowers!

Scattered these all over the garden. Some are traditional. Some are red.

Kind of Warm.

I forgot to leave the greenhouse door today. It was 88 degrees today. Got a little warmer inside. It's been like this all week.


I'm thankful I watered everything pretty well this morning. Didn't lose much at all.







This has been my best response to the heat. Found a way to set this up in the shadow of the canoe.

Whew!

Some Custom Garden Tools

I guess I'm just one of those guys that likes tools. If I can't find the one I want (or if I don't want to buy it), I may make my own. 

These are some of my greenhouse tools:

I cut down a shovel (we had too many) for use as a scoop for the soil bin. Best for filling the large plant pots.

I made a weeding tool out of a large fork from Goodwill (35ȼ). Most useful in the herb gardens and the very largest potted plants.

I added a longer handle to an old weeding trowel too. Makes a nice tiny shovel, and it's the perfect size for filling the start pots, or for transplanting those starts into the garden.

That top tool is a tiny hoe for potted plants: a piece of scrap steel and a dowel, attached with boy-scout lashing skills, and cleaned up with some shrink tube.  Best tool I've ever had for weeding potted plants, and the dowel works great for poking holes in soil to put onion starts or large seeds into, also.

And underneath is a bench brush. We get dirt all over the potting bench fairly often. This fixes that. It's actually the tool I use more than any other inside the greenhouse. I think that's funny.

I made a larger scoop from another busted shovel too. (We had an excess of shovels from a couple of estates this last year or two. Expensive shovels, but we want to use them somehow.)

The larger one hasn't been nearly as handy as the smaller one, but it's been good for mixing soils in the wheelbarrow and for scooping compost onto the garden.  

In the garden, there's nothing as useful as a shovel. But sometimes a more modest shovel  is more useful. 

The green one on the right is a child's shovel. Nice & small, but too light-duty to do any real work. So I took yet another spare full-size shovel and cut it down for the center one, and then I sharpened it (it isn't quite sharp enough to shave with). It fits my sweetie's daintier hands really nicely, and it has all the strength of the full-size shovel from whence it was made. They were so helpful, I ended up making two of them.





 

It's Called "Up-Potting"

I spent an afternoon last weekend taking starts out of their tiny pots and putting them in bigger pots, so that they can grow bigger & better.

I learned later (from this website) that this is called Up-Potting. And I learned that I was doing it right. That's a nice touch.

I think they're already growing faster.

And for the sake of updating the Free Start Pots
post, this is how easy it is to "up-pot" from those little things. I consider it excellent success:

Just peel back the top of the paper (and that's even optional!), set it on a base of potting soil, and fill in around with more soil. No fuss, no muss, and it doesn't fall to pieces in your hands! 

Rescued a Few Starts

 After yesterday's disaster, I was able to rescue a few starts. It was kind of surreal, pulling scraps of green out of the pile of dirt on the floor and planting them.






And a few of the brassicas went into the garden. They weren't really ready to go outside yet, but I guess that's true of an awful lot of us: we get to grow up and face the real world faster than we think we're ready to.