A Few Tomato Seedlings Succumb to Sunstroke

The plants had been hardening off outside during the past week, trying to get them used to the great outdoors. For a couple days the clouds rolled away and the sun has been bearing down, leading to the sad demise of a few tomato plants. Now they are a shadow of their former selves with their brown desiccated leaves and crumpled lifeless forms. Good thing there are so many extra tomato plants.

The eggplants and peppers are doing great, they are still fairly small but forming lots of new leaves. I will probably purchase a few sweet pepper plants and hopefully some serrano and anaheim peppers, if I can find them. The popsicle sticks are plant labels for when they go out in the garden.

Temperatures are forecasted to be dangerously close to freezing tonight, so the frost sensitive plants are spending the night indoors for their protection. I found green aphids on the pepper plants and a single flea beetle on an eggplant, so after squishing them I dusted the plants with diatomaceous earth to catch any new hatchlings or bugs I might have missed.

Hardening Off Tomatoes, Peppers and Eggplants

It's 70 degrees outside! (21 Celsius) Such a gorgeously warm day with just enough cloud cover, the perfect day to set the plants outside for some real sunlight.

I finally pricked the last of the peppers out of the coconut coir starting medium and put them into their individual styrofoam cups. The granulated coconut coir I use is a light and fluffy starting medium, very easy for the plants to sprout out of. But it is a non-nutritive material made from coconut husk fibers which provides very little nutrition to the growing plants, so I go ahead and prick out the seedlings once they sprout and replant them.

There were enough trays to set a hundred plants outside to enjoy the afternoon sun, a mixture of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. That left only 35 of the biggest tomato plants inside still under lights.

There's enough Brandywine tomatoes for me to experiment with different support techniques which will give me a good idea of production effects while keeping the variety of tomato constant. The 3 support systems will by my husband's interpretation of the Florida weave, staking and pruning of suckers to one leader, and caging tomatoes with either bamboo and twine or wire fencing.

The cold winter we had this year really did a number on the insect population. I saw only two gnats and a single bee while outside today. Hopefully it won't be too hot this year. High heat sterilizes the pollen in peppers and eggplants, so fruit rarely set during the height of summer.

Okra Has Germinated and Hardening Off Seedlings

Very tall three day old Philippine Lady Finger okra

The Philippine Lady Finger okra was the first to sprout but I can see one Stewart's Zeebest okra starting to break through the surface of the soil. The okra seedlings are beautiful and otherworldly with their strangely delicate pale green crumpled first leaves. At only three days old the okra seedlings are larger than most vegetable seedlings with their thick stems and enormous leaves. They have already outgrown their peat pellets with rapacious seeking roots that will need to be repotted in the next day or so.

I am a bit nervous about putting the plants outside to start the hardening process to get them strong enough to be planted out, since the storm that beat up the tomato seedlings. Ah well. It must be done so the shuffling in and out of trays of plants in styrofoam cups will begin. The plan was to set them out in the soft morning light for a few hours each day, slowly lengthening the time until they can bare the harsh afternoon sun. It ended up being a good day to start hardening off the little seedlings with the sky grey and overcast. Although it was quite breezy outside which can be hard on the stems and drying to the plants so I went ahead and watered them in.