tomato trauma

can you say oops!! here is a hard lesson learned. when setting your tomatoes outside for a full day of direct sun, don't set them in a reflective metal pan. they will pretty much cook.

at least i'm pretty sure that's what happened here. at first, i though it was the variety of tomato, the yellow beam pear, and maybe my seeds were to old. but then i noticed one of the tomatoes in the small containers was a violet jasper, and it to was pretty much a goner. so they must have literally cooked in the pan. oops. i guess i could have tried to revive them, but since the yellow beam pear are my least favorite, and i'm working with limited space, i chalked it up to a lesson learned. luckily, the rest of the tomatoes seem to be doing fine. i just gave them a layer of compost as to create more roots along the stem. if they're not gonna be big guys when i put them in the ground, they better have a nice developed root system.

(f.y.i these guys are 9-10 weeks old, and still so tiny.)

i must say the jury is still out on my new soiless seedling starting mix of compost and sand. the seeds seem to germinate okay, but the plants don't seem to thrive as i think they should. it also could be the lack of worm castings this year. maybe that worm poo works as well as "they" say it does. so, after the holiday, hunting down worm poo goes straight to the top of the garden to do list.

last week, i also transplanted some of the pepper starts from the second round. these pepper plants are about 5 weeks old and just as big as the seedlings that survived from the first round started a month before them.

all in all, i'm just itching to get everything in the ground. and if all else fails, i can always throw in the towel and go buy starts from the demo garden, knowing that the sale of those plants go to support the local community gardens. until then, there's more research to be done on what to feed my babies once they hit the dirt, and lots of beer to be consumed to calm my nerves.

garden note to self: not sure about the new soiless mixture. at 5 weeks transplanted the pepper starts into bigger containers, which from the looks of it, did well in the newspaper pots and had healthy white roots. at around 9-10 weeks the tomato starts are still pretty small and i may need to feed them something soon.