[Ben E Lou]

It has been a while since I've posted, but that's not for lack of gardening activity. To the contrary, the issue has been that much of my free time has been taken up by doing actual gardening stuff. The highlights from the last month-ish. (Pics in the next post).

• The tomatoes have germinated and grown so well to date that I needed to thin many of the peat cells. I gave away 16-20 seedlings to friends/neighbors. I wish I could have given away more, but the rest were in cells so close together that I was afraid to try to pull hem apart. I'm now left with 32. (Yeah, too many!) I have 10 different varieties, so I chose the healthiest-looking one from each variety yesterday and moved those into large (4 and 5 inch) peat pots to eventually be placed in my garden. I intend to grow 3 chandlers, and then 1 each of the others, so I still need to pick out two more chandlers. Unless something goes badly with the ones in the peat pots, the ones remaining in the cells will be given away or maybe even sold.
• The sweet basil---from the 2018 seed packets I bought for 25 cents each--is also going gangbusters. I need a lot of it--some for my wife's herb garden, and some as companions in the main garden.
• Marigolds are looking strong as well.
• I'm out of space in my little greenhouse! For example, I have a 36-cell Jiffy tray with the large peat pellets in it housing 20 marigolds and 16 bell peppers. I'm doubting I can keep them in such small cells for another 2-3 weeks until our last frost. (Avg = 4/15.) If I get lucky, it's possible that it could be this coming Wednesday, though, more later. But if I need to keep them away from outside until mid-April, I hope the roots have enough room. The greenhouse has four shelves, each the size to hold two seed trays, but one slot on the bottom is taken by the space heater. One option, since it's not looking like we're going to get below 30ish outside, would be to remove the space heater and free up another space, but I'm leaning more toward just bringing the tomatoes inside at night, since they wouldn't like the non-heated greenhouse, which I'd think would fall to 40ish degrees on our colder nights.
• I think I over-watered my viola seedlings. Most of them are dead. I got some more and intend to start those soon, but again, no room in the greenhouse!
• Speaking of viola and other cool-season stuff planted early, much of it hasn't done all that well, and I strongly suspect that it's from a combination of over-watering and exposing them to too much cold too early. I assumed that since they were cool-season, I could just leave the seedlings outside as long as they didn't freeze. The good news is that it has been a learning experience, and the second round of planting the cool-season veggies went MUCH better. Prior to this season, I'd never done the seedlings/transplant thing, and had never planted anything before the last frost. What little gardening I'd done had been seeds or store-bought transplants put in the ground after the threat of frost was over. The struggles with the cool-season stuff taught me a lot, and I strongly suspect helped set me up for success with the tomatoes, marigolds, bell peppers, basil, and future-planted stuff.
• I bought this raised bed kit, and intend to use it primarily for strawberries. I tilled the ground under it, laid down cardboard boxes, wet them thoroughly, and filled it with a combination of cheap topsoil, miracle gro all-purpose, and Member's Mark potting soil.
• Not surprisingly, when you think about it, the cool-season stuff in my kids' gardens is outperforming the same stuff in the main one. The main area is a combination of crappy native soil, my homemade compost, and the amendments I added last year. Their raised beds are 100% store-bought good stuff--a combination of Miracle Gro all-purpose, Miracle Gro raised bed soil, black kow compost, and mushroom compost. And underneath that, I tilled and they put down newspaper, so I'm sure the worms have come out to play down there. The broccoli in my youngest's garden, for example, was transplanted to both places on the same day, from seedlings that had germinated on the same day. Hers is now close to 1.5 times the size of that in the main garden.