Transplants

Kidney, heart, lung, you know, the regular. (Kidney beans, artichoke hearts…um can’t thing of anything for lungs… mung beans is the best I have ;-)

I've probably been watching too much Nurse Jackie and obsessing on hospital stuff.

To the garden at hand though I figured out why these things were growing so slowly in the little pots.  I planted them over A MONTH AGO, which means they should have been transplanted into the ground or big pots a while back.  I didn’t realize how much time had passed until I checked back to the first blog post, which was the end of March.

Yesterday I did a ton of transplanting – I transplanted many of the rouge tomato seedlings that were scattered all over the Side Door Garden (SDG).  Put them into different sized pots I had been saving from all the purchases of seedlings I have made from Home Depot etc over the last couple of years.

I moved all sorts of seedlings around – moved and replanted in the SDG some basil seedlings which where too close to other basil seedling, planted stuff (carrots, snow peas, radishes) from the peat Jiffy pots into the ground – some in the SDG and some just right into the front yard.  Moved the cilantro seedlings into pots.

I always though transplanting seedlings was a delicate surgery and that if not done exactly right would often end up killing the plant but, based on what I see 24 hours later, 99 percent of the seedlings that were moved are doing perfectly well.

Moral of the story is don’t hesitate to transplant if/when you need/want to.

Things I learned during the transplanting yesterday, besides that there is no need to waste time obsessing over exactly how you do a transplant:

Need a big bag of wooden popsicle stick or tongue depressors to use as plant ID sticks in the pots, because the plastic ones from the garden store are too expensive when you need hundreds of them.

Need to complete ASAP the drip irrigation for the SDG – I’ve only got three of the six rows on.  Also I think the soaker drip would be much better than the inline drip for this kind of planting layout

Need to turn and prepare whatever remaining dirt I have along the driveway ASAP and in the front yard too for vegetable planting because I have lots of seedlings waiting to go into the ground

Need to buy or build something for the snow peas, zucchini and long beans to trellis up along.

Need to find out/figure out what kind of mulch is the best when the seedlings are so small.  I’m using redwood shavings/chips on the bigger plants (and it’s great but expensive), but I need to put something down around the little seedlings to help keep weeds down and to conserve the moisture in the soil.  To be perfectly honest I’ve been having really good luck with cardboard as a weed barrier.  Not the most attractive solution though.

Mulch is one of those holy grail things, like irrigation, or camera bags for those in the business – always trying to find the perfect one, buying and trying out every type but never finding one that is perfect.

And the final thing I learned is that I have a lot of things that need to be done ASAP ;-)