Seeds in the Garden

I finally finished seeding my garden. I did most of it last week, but today I seeded Kohlrabi, Swiss Chard, and some radishes. I couldn’t find any Kohlrabi plants in the garden centers, so I bought seeds. I haven’t been very lucky in the last few years with seeded Kohlrabi. We love Kohlrabi, but it has to be tender. It does have a tendency to become woody, especially when the weather gets too hot.

My pepper and tomato plants are growing too tall for the pots, but I can’t transplant them into the garden yet, the weather is too unstable. I’m hoping next week I’ll be able to work in the garden and get it finished, but there is no guarantee that we won’t still get frost. Should that happen, it will be running back and forth with the tarps to cover up the plants over night. That is always lots of fun.

I didn’t buy as many tomato plants this year, because I always tend to overplant. I bought 6 Super Fantastic, 6 Fantastic, 6 Celebrity,  but I will use only 3 from each tray and discard the others. It will be tough to do that, but I must not fall into temptation like other years and plant them all. I also bought 6 Roma, which I will plant. We use them for Salsa. In addition to that I also bought 4 Cherry tomatoes (my wife loves them), 1 Health Kick (it is actually a type of Roma tomato). Then I still have a few tomato plants which I seeded myself. Can you see where it will end up again? How can I destroy the plants I raised with so much love and patience?

My tomato plants are quite leggy, so I transplanted one of each variety into 3 inch pots yesterday. Hopefully, by the time I put them into the garden they will have developed roots on the buried part of the stem. I have 12 different types, some are Heirloom, some are from hybrid tomatoes I saved, which is not really a good idea. I will keep a close watch which ones are good and which ones are not good. I will cut down next year with growing my own tomatoes from seeds. The seedlings are not expensive to buy and they are better than what I can produce. I just do it for fun and for the challenge.

This year I bought white plastic labels at the Dollar Store to replace the ones I’ve had for the last few years. I wrote the name of the vegetables on the labels with a permanent ink marker. I hope they work out. The ones I had were cedar stakes with plastic sleeves on top. I put the pictures of the vegetables inside the sleeves. They didn’t look so great anymore. The sun bleached the pictures and the rain and dirt that splashed up made them pretty much unreadable. I love these new labels. They look so professional.

Our grass is growing, especially since I spread fertilizer on it a couple of weeks ago. I cut it last week but left the cuttings on the grass because of the fertilizer inside the grass tops.

Yard and garden work is physically demanding, but if you want a nice yard and your own vegetables, there is no getting around it, you’ll have to do pull up your sleeves and get to working. Sometimes it seems too much work, but it keeps me in shape, and we love the fresh vegetables. There is nothing better than eating tomatoes ripened on the vine, I mean, on the actual living vine, before they are picked. Besides the taste there is the additional benefit of eating something that doesn’t have any chemicals on it. I can’t wait to pick the first beans. They are just so tender fresh from the garden.

Today I noticed that my Goodland Apple tree has many blooms beginning to form. The tree is 5 years old and didn’t bloom last year. Hopefully, we’ll get some apples from it this year. We used to have 2 Goodland Apple trees on our last residence in Winnipeg. The apples grow to about 3 ½ inches and taste great. They don’t last as long as store bought, but they are wonderful in cakes and pies, too.

If they grow good, they are heavy producers. I remember one year we had over 350 pounds of apples. We couldn’t use them all, so we gave many away.