Advancing Vegetables

Unfortunately growing vegetables inevitably comes with some failures as well as successes. Remember the Bleu de Solaise Leeks we planted from seed? Well, many of them sprouted, but died shortly after. I guess, as with onions, leeks are susceptible to rot, because I feel I may have over watered them. Luckily though, we planted some Lyon Prizetaker Leek seeds that we bought from Lowe's which are doing well. Hopefully, these ones can make it to the garden.

Our tomatoes are doing stunningly well this year! They are all approximately 6 or so inches tall at this point, which is an ideal minimum height for planting. As the May 24 weekend is approaching,when we would like to plant our tomatoes in the ground, we decided to start the hardening-off-process with them. This process is simply to get plants that have only ever been indoors used to the outdoor elements. Yes, tomatoes can get both sunburn and windburn! Megan and I learned this last year after setting our tomato plants outside in the direct sun for too long, and we paid the price by losing several of those plants. The tomato leaves of indoor tomato plants are so papery thin that they need time to build up to the elements.

The method for getting tomato plants used to the outdoors is simply to place your plants outside for short intervals in shade each day before building to longer intervals and gradually working the plants' ways into the direct sun. For example, yesterday we kept our plants in the shade for an hour, while today we're expanding that to an hour and a half with fifteen minutes or so in sun. There's no basic formula that we're working with, but we're judging based on how good our plants look while sitting out, and if they start looking worse for wear, we'll bring them indoors. You will ideally do this until the tomatoes can adequately stay in full sun for the entire day.

Here are some photos of our lovely tomato plants:

                                                                 Purple Calabash

                    
                                                                 Yellow Pear

                                                               Green Zebra

                                                                 Red Zapotec

                                                                Purple Cherokee

                                                             A mixture of tomatoes

In addition to our tomatoes, our Bulgarian Carrot Peppers and Jimmy Nardello Peppers are doing very well too. As usual though, peppers grow a lot slower than tomato plants, but we are confident that once they hit the garden next weekend, they will sprout up quite quickly!

Our lettuces have grown in the last week and the arugula seeds we planted in the pot have now germinated. I'm excited to see how these will grow as we have never grown arugula before.

Here is one of our Musquee de Provence Pumpkins. Last year, we direct sowed our pumpkin seeds, but this year with the seeds I collected and dried, we decided to start them indoors. As such, our plants are quite advanced in comparison to last year.

Jennifer