Tough Love

We just had a couple little squabbles over the tomato plants on this cloudy and cold late Sunday morning. First, David asked if he could shut the windows in the spare bedroom (otherwise known as the nursery -- for plants, that is) because he "didn't want them to get cold." I argued that the whole point of leaving the windows open is to let them experience the cold as a way of preparing them for their outside home -- in two weeks (for some experimental "volunteers") or in three weeks (for the bulk of the plants) or in four weeks (for the ones who will be planted at the "proper" date). David must've forgotten that we have left the infant, nurturing stage of plant-guardianship; now we need to toughen them up to face the cold, cruel world.

Our second disagreement occurred when David showed me two plants, both the same species (we think), but one has no main suckers growing out of the middle. (I guess plants can be infertile, just like people.) David asked, "Should we throw it out?" and I shrieked (in my usual calm way), "NoooooOOO!"

Here's where I am a softie. I know we'll have to "weed out" the losers and plant only the ones we can be relatively assured will produce fruit (because that's the whole point of all this, isn't it?), but I'm just not ready to do that yet.

In other developments, we can see the garden from our living room couch, so we were able to spy a squirrel digging brazenly in the beets! David ran with the speed of Hermes and scared the bejeezus out of that creature.

Where are the cats? Why can't they guard their garden properly? (And why can't they learn to use the paths instead of rolling around in the peas or plopping down in the spinach?)

Ah, the cats! As I type this post on the computer, I can see Finley peeing in the garden, right smack in the spot where we will plant more herbs this week. Yuck.

I can't blame the cats really; the soil's been turned over and it has such a nice, rich texture. Not that I have any interest in making it my bathroom.

Overly Enthusiastic

Sometimes you make mistakes.

Like when you plant cucumber seedlings just because you have more seedling trays and those soiless mix pellets and the other plants have been so fun to raise. So you plant cucumbers just for the hell of it -- at least six weeks early -- and then, because they are bursting out of their little pots, you go ahead and plant them in the ground.

You know how it is: the weather's been perfect, and it feels like real, actual, genuine Spring, with temps in the 60s and even 70s and you actually get a little burned nose and you have to water twice a day...so you think, "What the hell? Let's give 'em a shot." So you plant cucumbers in the ground in mid-April.

Cucumbers are known as "very tender" vegetables, and they won't germinate in soil lower than 50-degrees. In our house, in their little hothouse shelters, they burst forth from the soil(less) mix. Now they are in the garden, next to some carrots and some pansies and a hollycock. And they are very unhappy.

Here's a photo of how they looked on the warm day we planted them.

[Sigh.] They are not long for this world.

Tiny Specks of Green

Richard didn't appear from nowhere, obviously. (Neither did his fellow 113 tomato seedlings. Incidentally, we were wrong about the seventy-nine normal seedlings mentioned in the previous post; we planted far more than that. [We counted them this afternoon.] And if you count spinach seedlings or cucumber seedlings or beet seedlings or pea seedlings..., well, then the number we planted is just plain ridiculous.)

Richard was the inspiration for this blog, but there are seven weeks of gardening history to cover as an introduction. We'd like to record Richard's valiant effort to turn into something productive (ah, so like parents, we), but this blog might be helpful next winter when we forget everything we did and in what steps and on what schedule.

We're winging it this year. We've read a lot about seedlings and gardening, but a lot of what we are doing is just guesswork and hope. According to our Picasa records, we planted seedlings on February 22 -- tomatoes and beets. It was a couple weeks early based on the Almanac, but we wanted to try anyway.

Four days later we were rewarded with tiny specks of green -- sooner than we'd expected. Beets bring near-instant joy!

--Camille

One is the Loneliest Number

A week or so ago, David asked me, "Camille, which tomato is the saddest?" and I guessed wrong. It wasn't the tomato with the yellowed leaves or smallest leaves, it was the tomato with only one leaf. Poor Richard. He seems to have been afflicted with some debilitating tomato illness that has removed all folliage aside from one stout leaf. Strangely, this one leaf is enormous, and appears to be in perfect health.

In an attempt to right all wrongs in the world, we have repotted Richard in a claypot-home of his very own, and set him dead, smack in the middle of our strongest flourescent growlight. He has been fortified, watered, and verbally encouraged. We have not revealed that there are seventy-nine tomato plants just like him (only far larger and in significantly better health), or that he's only a tomato plant, and really, what does it matter if he dies anyhow? or that "Richard" is a terrible name in the first place.

Our hopes are low.

Scientifically speaking, there really is no way he will a) develop any more leaves or b) develop fruit because he has no joints. There's no place for him to start growing another branch. With (ahem) normal tomato plants, the new branches the start growing between an original branch and the main stem are called "suckers." When we want to inhibit "sprawling" branches and force the plants to bear fruit, we snap off these sucker. Because poor Richard has only one leaf growing from one stem, there's nowhere for him to grow new branches. The only future we see for him is to grow taller and sturdier -- but he will remain impotent with one leaf.

--Camille