Finished Planting the Warm Weather Seedlings

Most everything was under cups in preparation for a few days of cold temperatures.

Brandywine tomato freed  from its cup confinement.

The leaves of this Pantano Romanesco tomato are all scrunched from being forced into cups.

Tomatoes right before covering them with Agribon floating row covers.

The warm weather plants that were started indoors are finally all planted out. That's 64 tomato plants, 42 hot and sweet pepper plants, and 33 eggplants planted. Whew. My back is tired. At first the plants spent time under plastic cups to protect them from a few cold nights, plus any uncovered seedling ends up getting destroyed by birds. So far five tomatoes and two peppers have been loss to bird activity.

It's supposed to be warming up the next couple of days, so I went ahead and took the plastic cups off of all the plants and then immediately recovered them with Agribon floating row covers. Floating row covers can damage growing tips on peppers and tomatoes, so it's important to have a support system in place, I'm using cups which will later be put on stakes when the plants get taller.

One pole bean and not a single okra has sprouted after 10 days, but some critter has been digging around the pole bean and okra bed. I dug around a couple of the poles and only found a single bean, it has been wet and rainy the last few days so maybe the beans have rotted in the ground. Either way the whole bed will have to be reseeded.

Four rows of bush beans were directly sowed in the second to last bed at the rear of the garden. The last bed in the back is reserved for summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and vining plants. I have 6 edible luffa sprouts and 3 bitter melon sprouts that have just germinated! How utterly exciting. I haven't gotten the luffa or bitter melon to fruit here in Kentucky and these are the last of the seeds, they grew just fine in the desert so I'm not sure what the problem may be.

There is still buckets of spinach, lettuce, and Chinese greens to be planted. It's a chore, but a happy chore.