April 2001

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Sunday the 29th

Now that I've finally posted last week's pictures, I'll fill in what else has happened since the 11th.

I think we may have finally rid ourselves of winter here in the Bay Area. The past week has been very nice, with almost every day near or above 70 degrees. We even had a couple of days last week that got into the upper 70s. I'm sure the plants loved that.

The tomatoes have definitely started growing again. In fact, one of the pictures from last weekend shows the first flower buds on a tomato plant. Most of the plants have them now, although none of them have opened yet. I'm anticipating rapid growth from now on, so I put cages around all of the plants yesterday.

Most of the peppers are in the ground now. The only stragglers are the Aji, Cayenne and Hungarian hot wax, which had to be restarted from seed. They are coming along okay, but are a bit spindly. I took them outside for a few hours each of yesterday and today in an effort to toughen them up. I'm hoping they will slow down the upward growth and develop thicker stems and more leaves. These plants are my only shot; I planted two peat pots of each, and only one of each sprouted. The good news is that four habanero cells (from the original pepper plantings in January!) have sprouted. It took a while, but they finally came up.

The basil in peat pots is coming along, as well. The Siam Queen is a bit spindly, just like the peppers, but the sweet Italian is already putting out the first pair of true leaves and looks good. The oregano is coming along very slowly, too. I have to be extra careful with it because the plants are so tiny (it doesn't take much to hurt the stem and kill it). As usual, the only thing proving really difficult is the rosemary, which, again, still hasn't sprouted.

In the garden, everything has sprouted and is doing well except for the Green Ice and Buttercrunch lettuces. I will probably have to plant seeds of those again soon and try again. The failure of these two is probably just bad luck.

Of the plants on the front porch, neither the gardenia or the jasmine is flowering yet. I'm guessing both plants are still recovering from transplant shock. The third plant (the hanging one) is a fuchsia. It has some very pretty purple and pink flowers that has been blooming for a couple of weeks now. A bird recently decided to build a nest in it, though, which caused some damage to one side of the plant. The bird ended up laying an egg in it before I noticed, so I left it alone. Sometime this weekend the egg fell out (my guess is that it was knocked out by the mother bird one of the times she scrambled out of the nest -- she does that a lot since the fuchsia is right by our front door). So today I removed the nest and gave the plant a soaking. Hopefully it will recover.

What else did I do this weekend? I planted the remaining lily bulbs (the others were planted a few weeks ago), the free sunflower seeds Burpee sent me, and some morning glory and moonflowers to cover our trellis on the side of the house. There used to be a morning glory there, but the previous owners did a terrible job of keeping it up, so we ripped the whole thing out to get rid of the dead stuff. It will be nice to have a mix of flowers, anyway.

You may notice from last week's pictures that some of the plants are doubled up (cucumbus, zucchini, spinach). That's me playing it safe and planting two or more seeds in each hole. This weekend I cut everything down to one plant per hole.

Finally, although I forgot to take a picture (dumb me), I picked the first thing from the garden this weekend. Many of the radishes were too close to each other, so I thinned them out. Some of the ones I pulled were big enough to eat, so I did just that. Very tasty! I also thinned out the carrots. They were far too close.. next time, I need to do a better job planting those seeds.

This month sure went by fast.

Sunday the 22nd

(I'm cheating a little. I'm actually writing this on the 29th, but I never posted a bunch of pictures from last week.)

The garden is mostly taking care of itself these days. Weeds haven't really found it yet, and I just water it every two or three days, depending on the temperature. On weekends I fertilize. Otherwise, I'm just waiting for things to grow and give me edible goodies. :-)

Bean	Broccoli	Little Caesar lettuce	Carrot
Coriander (cilantro)	Cucumber	Endive	Garlic
Onion	Pea	Radish	Spinach
Tomato	Tomato flower buds!	Zucchini

Wednesday the 11th

Haven't had a lot of time to spend in the garden lately. We had guests in town this past weekend, and were busy doing the tourist thing in Napa Valley and San Francisco.

The tomato plants seem to have settled in well and are growing again, enough that I think I will stake a few of them this weekend (or sooner, if I can get home from work early enough). Of the seeds directly planted in the garden, the garlic, peas, spinach and Little Caesar lettuce have sprouted. Inside, the sweet Italian basil and oregano has sprouted, but nothing else. I think the peat pots are allowing more moisture to escape than the cell packs did, as I'm having to water them almost every day.

Bay Area weather lately has been pretty awful. Daytime temperatures are only in the low 60s and it gets down into the high 30s and low 40s at night. The plants are in no danger (in fact, it's probably good for the broccoli, since it's really a cool weather plant), but it's going to slow down growth a little.

Plans for this weekend: probably will transplant some peppers (both bells, the Peter Peppers, Fluorescent Purple, Barker's Hot and poblano). I'm also hoping to get the sunflower seeds that Burpee sent free with my order planted somewhere, but I need to find a good place for them. I think they'll end up on the side of the house, which is currently home to many weeds. Finally, we bought some lily bulbs a couple of weekends ago and those really need to be planted so they have a chance of blooming this summer.

Tuesday the 3rd

This past weekend was just beautiful, so I took the opportunity to get most of the rest of my seeds into the garden. That would be the carrots, onions, garlic, various lettuces, beans, peas, radishes, parsely, coriander and chives. Last week I re-planted the rosemary (never sprouted) and oregano (barely sprouted, then eaten by the snails) in peat pots. I re-ordered some seeds from Pepper Joe's to replace the plants the snails ate (aji and cayenne, my free seeds this time were Hungarian hot wax). Those were planted into peat pots last Thursday. Then yesterday I planted two kinds of basil (Siam Queen, again to replace snail-eaten plants, and sweet Italian). Those will be ready for transplant into the garden probably in mid-May if all goes well. A late start, but better than not having them at all.

The serrano and broccoli all went into the ground, too. The tomatoes are just sitting there at the moment. I'm sure they're busy putting out roots, so the appearance of dormancy is expected.

Also bought some flowers in a vain attempt to attract beneficial bugs to my garden. I've already seen a few aphids crawling around on the pepper seedlings. A blast of water takes care of them now, but later on I'll have too many plants to be so attentive. The flowers haven't been transplanted yet, but I'm hoping to get a chance to do that tomorrow or Thursday, or possibly Friday, when the weather has improved.

Finally, this past weekend we bought a few things for our front porch, in an effort to give it a nicer look. One is a star jasmine, another is an everblooming gardenia and I forget the third. It's hanging from a hook, not nearly as big as the other two. I'll take pictures of them all when they start to flower. Right now they're nice, but I'm sure will look much better later.