
Wow. I meant to update this sooner -- I didn't realize I went so long without a garden update.
So everything is still alive and things are growing. The squash plants -- Delicata, and summer green and yellow -- are absolutely thriving. Which is great, since we love us some squash. The watermelons are purring along as are the cucumbers, although something seems to have dug up one of my cucumber seed hills. The seeds nonetheless struggled through anyway.
As I may have mentioned, the only drawback is that things just aren't growing very fast. Some of those things are plants I started as transplants and some were directly sown. I'm disappointed in the tomatoes and peppers I started as transplants from seeds I bought -- they got to be about an inch high and then simply stopped growing. My hypothesis is that I started them in very tiny seed starter pots and I suspect that they might have eaten up all the nutrition in that soil and then just stopped growing.
Because of this, I got a couple of transplants for peppers and tomatoes just in case mine don't produce any fruit -- and at this point it's highly doubtful they will -- and as you can see from today's picture, my sweet banana peppers, a transplant from the nursery, are starting to fruit. I picked up Brandywine heirloom transplants and I'll likely also pick up a pear tomato plant or two since those are also very tiny.
But at least there are things starting to produce soon-to-be-edible foods now, such as my turnips. The beans are looking good and are beginning to flower, while the potato plants are just getting plain huge. I'll have more pictures of those through the week.
Tomatoes and peppers need heat to grow. I think it is 70F+. They may have just stopped because they felt it was not warm enough.
But if it is any consellation, I find my volunteer tomatoes grow and produces as well at the end of the season as the transplants that I put ni the garden.
Posted by: Hanna in Cleveland | June 20, 2006 07:57 PM
Perhaps that's it, Hanna. Thanks for the reassurance. :)
Posted by: Hellchick | June 20, 2006 08:38 PM
That's absolutely correct. Last year, during the Illinois' worst drought in forever, my tomato and pepper plants did awesome with the heat so long as I supplanted the water. They thrive off it.
Posted by: Penguinx | June 21, 2006 11:38 AM
I can second the heat info Have you tried surrounding your tomatoes with black plastic? They always seem to grow better in my area if the ground is kept warmer than the normal soil temperature. It hasn't failed my parents or myself for as long as I can remember.
Posted by: jjohnsen | July 8, 2006 07:23 PM