Sunday, May 13, 2012

Hardening Off

Happy Mothers Day!

Not a very big selection this year: four black cherry tomato plants, three California wonder peppers and two Hungarian hot wax peppers. Not sure if I'll plant all of them. I also have some golden midget and sugarbaby watermelons inside along with a dozen basil and celery plants.


I've been putting these out to harden off for the past few days now. Weather has been nice but the winds have been blowing strong making it hard to keep the little plants out there for too long. I think I'll be planting these soon - no later than the end of the week. Have to get the balcony cleaned up too. And I need to buy more potting soil, fertilizer and compost. It's going to be a busy week.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Lighting

I wanted to get some extra lighting over some of my seedlings so I picked up this 22" HO fluorescent growlight at Lee Valley. I was going to construct some kind of stand for it from some scraps of wood but I didn't really feel like putting even that kind of commitment into it (yeah, I'm lazy). My kids have this K'NEX toy set that they rarely use so I quickly put together this little frame to temporarily hold the light above one of my starter trays.


I have another tray and I could use more light but this is good enough. And this was a week ago. The plants in the other tray; tomatoes and pepeprs, have been potted up to individual 3 inch pots now.

Like every season, I'm running behind in my planting. I did good with the tomatoes but the peppers could have been seeded earlier. And the celery is way off. Far too late, but I'll try anyways. Basil is on schedule. And I keep forgetting to start the melons. Maybe tomorrow...