Plant Update and Lessons Learned

The "Lessons Learned" part of this post has to do with some plants and soil we bought, which I'll get to below... Matt & I went to Hong Kong the last week in April. We were gone for almost 10 days, and during that time we kept some of our seedlings inside because the temps here were still too cold overnight to safely leave them out. The good news is that none of our plants died while we were gone, but none of them really developed either.  For example, compare the sunflowers -- we started both varieities from seed indoors during the same week:

giant sunflowers, started from seed, transplanted 4/14, picture taken 5/7

Chianti sunflower seedlings, transplanted 5/1, picture taken 5/7

We transplanted the Chianti seedlings to a pot outside when we got back. The difference in growth rates could just be that they grow differently, or that we transplanted them later, but I think it has to do with the soil. We bought it from a nursery that sells plants, flowers, mulch, and soil at a high school near our hosue during the spring as a fund raiser. We usually just buy a couple of plants, but this year we bought soil, some tomato plants, and the Mignonette strawberries.  Well, mushrooms sprouted in everything we planted in the soil from the school--both what was kept indoors and outside--and the tomato and strawberry plants don't look so good. I'm not sure which nursery the school works through, but that was a little disappointing. Then again, is it us? We're still new at this, maybe we shouldn't have kept things inside? Anyway, we went back to our trusty Home Depot for more bags of soil and mulch, and that's what everything else is planted in now.

We also put more Chianti seedlings in the pot, so this will be an interesting experiment to see if they grow differently in the (better?) soil.

Strawberries

Mignonette and Quinalt

One of the Mignonette strawberries (variety on left) didn't make it when we got back. Things were kind of slimy, but we salvadged what we could and put them in the ground. To replace what we lost, we bought 4 Quinalt variety strawberry plants (right). They're a bigger variety and already have some fruit!

Elevated Squash Bed

This year we're doing something new--we have a special bed just for squash. In this bed we have four varieties which I'll be planting in quadrants--clockwise from top left: butterstick, pic-n-pic (yellow), sweet gourmet (yellow), and zucchini

And here's our container garden: