When I said that I wanted to get up early this morning as I went to bed last night, 4:30 am was not exactly what I had in mind. However, since that 4:30 wake up call came with over an inch of rain, I will deal with early.
I took a big gamble by planting my tomatoes early this year. There have been a handful of nights since planting that were down in the 30s, but covered with frost cloth, they have done very well. I was concerned that the frost cloth was not allowing enough light in to keep them covered around the clock so I finally got around to switching out to floating row cover. The two look very similar, but the floating row cover is much lighter and allows more light in. I will leave them covered until they outgrow it.
Tonight I will put the frost cloth over the top of the row cover because temps are predicted to be about 40, which means at our house it will more likely be around 35. The other benefit of using the row cover is for protection from the elements. Yesterday and today, as the winds blow fiercely, the tomatoes were spared from spending the days blowing about which can stress the plant. They were also protected from the powerful thunderstorm and hail that we had last night. If you are going to be successful with tomatoes in Texas, I firmly believe that row cover is a necessity!
Here is a shot of how the tomatoes are doing. I am quite amazed at how big they are. It appears that my potting soil experiment is so far quite successful as the tomatoes in the bags are about double the size of the plant in my raised bed. I am not sure what that means other than I need to get around to soil testing.
For someone that said they were not growing tomatoes this year, I sure have a lot of tomatoes planted. I believe I am now up to 11 plants. On the left in the above image is another early girl. It took some significant freeze damage soon after I bought it and I thought I had killed it. It has been sitting on the back patio for the past month and after being much neglected, had recovered so well that I decided the determined little guy could have some real estate in the garden. On the right is a Black Cherry heirloom variety. I am crossing my fingers it will do well.
The corn is continuing to sprout, some of the plants are now about 2-3 inches tall. The carrots are finally sprouting. No sign of any of the lettuce I planted by seed. The New Zealand spinach is sprouting well, but the other two spinach varieties have not sprouted yet. I am afraid that I killed my potatoes.
We harvested our first lettuce from the garden last night. It was quite yummy. Evidently I will need to get better at planting it from seed so that I can have succession plantings. So far I am failing with the seeds.
It makes me very happy to see basil popping up all over! I believe the plant on the left is borage...or a weed. Now that I think about it, I believe it is a weed.
This seedling makes me excited too! The Malabar Spinach is popping up. It is not yet coming up in the bed where it was planted last year. This is where I had it two years ago. I plan to trellis and let it grow in both places this year.
Blooming blackberries is another sight that makes me happy! I have been digging up blackberry plants and have several to give away. The are proving to make good on that warning on being invasive. However, as long as you dig up the new plants, then the invasive nature is not a major issue. And, it gives me plants to share!
I also worked on my kitchen window bed for an hour our so. I have some serious affection for perennials. I think it is just amazing to put in a plant and then see it return year after year. I may live to regret this decision, but in the half of the space that is still empty, I am planting several varieties of mint. I have had peppermint and spearmint in for two years now. Now that I have a dehydrator, my plan is to begin drying it and making my own mint tea. The new varieties include chocolate mint, ginger mint, apple mint, English mint and mountain mint.
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