Ending and Beginning

Transplanted another 11 tomatoes into 4″ square pots and moved the 23 largest down to the greenhouse. From now on we have to remember to open the outside greenhouse door in the morning and close it at night. Those down in the greenhouse are approaching the size of the plants they’ll be selling in garden centers a month from now, so I’d say we started the seeds a couple of weeks early.

Also got another 48″ 2-bulb fluorescent fixture going down in the greenhouse. It’s on that built-in timer I put down there ten or twelve years ago. I may move one of the three fixtures we have upstairs down to the greenhouse.

I bought 4 more rolls of 28″ x 50′ fencing yesterday.

I set some of the tomatoes outside for a few hours in the afternoon to start getting them used to full sun.

Spent half an hour hoeing dandelions and quack grass in the garden. I’m cautiously optimistic about the grass situation for this year — right now, it doesn’t look so bad. But we’ll see how it looks in a month when everything is starting to grow like mad.

Also, last summer, most of my quack grass eradication efforts were spent with a shovel, digging up as much of the roots as I could find. That’s pretty hard work, not to mention that it disturbs the roots of the vegetables. This year, I want to see if using a hoe will work well enough.

Meanwhile, the tomato plants inside are getting bigger and bigger. Most of them need to move into larger pots. We’ve still got 4-5 weeks to go before we can put them in the garden, and we’re almost out of space in the house. We have to get some down in the greenhouse.

Well, it’s snowing again today, with several cold, cloudy days forecast, so I brought the two biggest tomatoes back upstairs from the greenhouse and squeezed them onto the seed-starting table. Maybe next week it will be something more like Spring….

Today I transplanted eight pepper plants and the largest 4 tomatoes  into larger containers. DS6 helped me a bit, which was great. Half the reason we’re doing all this stuff is to show the boys how.

Fertilized everything with Miracle-Gro except the herbs.

Here’s a pic of all the seedlings remaining upstairs. On the right side you can see some of the tomatoes I just put into cut-off 42-oz oatmeal boxes. On the left you can see some in those newspaper pots, and in the foreground are the peppers in cardboard yogurt containers.

I moved the two largest tomatoes down to the greenhouse. We’re going to have to remember they’re down there, to open the door on warm days, close it in the evening, and open the door to the basement on cold nights. We’ve got a low of 25°F forecast in a couple of days, which probably isn’t cold enough to freeze inside the greenhouse, but I’ll open the door to the basement just to be on the safe side.

Yesterday I got out in the garden and officially opened this year’s campaign against the quack grass. I just walked around and hoed up any weeds (with my new Rogue Hoe) that were showing their faces, mostly dandelions and grass. I think if we’re diligent this year and fight hard, we’ll have the corner turned on the quack grass. It’s awful stuff. We will never mulch with hay again.

We will also never put down any plastic or landscape cloth in the garden again. The quack grass grows right through it and once it does that it’s very difficult to either kill the grass or pull up the plastic.

I paced off the perimeter of the garden a few days ago and came up with 220′. I told CR that I would need about 25 fence posts, and he said he’d drop them off. He has some that are too short for regular fencing that should be perfect for my 28″ fencing.