We are not much closer to having a garden. One thing we did accomplish last weekend was to measure and put in stakes for where the beds are going. We established that the placement of the beds will not interfere with Mike's ham radio antenna guy lines and antenna tie downs. It seems like it's going to be a tremendous amount of work to level off that old garden bed, but Mike says it will not be that difficult.
We have started saving cardboard to put down between the beds and mulch over. I have heard multiple people say that it doesn't work over time, and the only thing that really works is black plastic with mulch over it. I understand that, but I don't really want to mess with the groundwater absorption by putting black plastic between all the beds. So I will just have to weed after the cardboard decays.
My tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings continue to do well, with most of them having true leaves now. I have rearranged the pots to put the tomatoes on the outside, since they were starting to shade the eggplants and peppers. The New Hanover ground cherries are finally up, and I have thinned them down to one for now. I usually wait until they are larger to thin, but a whole clump of them had come up within the size of a quarter.
I'm a little concerned that some of the tomatoes are crinkly around the leaf edges. Perhaps I am fertilizing too much. I will not use fertilizer the next time I water them. The foliage is also a lighter green than I would like, and I don't know if that's because it's just new growth or if maybe my lights are not as good as I hoped. I will continue to monitor the situation.
The potatoes that I set out a few weeks ago to chit in the light are starting to do well. One set has sprouts that are thick and green and over a quarter inch long. I have read that means it's okay to go ahead and plant them. So this weekend I will get out one of my new potato growing fabric pots and plant that group.
I'm really new at this potato stuff. I have read that one can cut the potatoes so that there's an eye in each major clump, and then let them dry and plant them. I'm kind of afraid to cut into them! Plus they are going into the same grow bag, so would it really make sense?
The latest arrivals are my rhubarb crowns. You can see one of them is raring to go, and I need to plant those this weekend as well. I will plant the two crowns in two different places to increase my odds of getting a successful crop. I still don't have a really good feel for what areas are shady in the summer, so I will plant one over by the shed where it will get afternoon shade from the shed. We had rhubarb outside the back porch when I was growing up, but it was just there when we bought the house. We never really tended it except to harvest some of it in the summer.
These are "crimson red" from Renee's seeds. There were a couple of other cultivars I was looking for, but they were two or three times the price and I decided, how much flavor variation can there be in rhubarb anyway? Renee's had a pair of crowns for $19.95 plus $6.95 shipping. Most other places were selling single crowns for at least $10 more for the crown and closer to $11 for shipping. Crimson red was still pretty high on the list of good cultivars, so I'm happy.
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