I’m disappointed with the radishes; it got too hot too quickly, so only a few have bulbed so far and those were smaller than my thumbnail.  For both types I planted, their maturity date is less than 30 days (22 and 28 I think)  so if they’re not going to bulb now, they aren’t going to.  I’m pretty sure the date I planted them was March 27 or 28.  I pulled some up this morning hoping for something big enough to try eating (still may eat the tiny ones, just to try), but it was quite disappointing.  We’ll have to try again in the fall when it cools down.  It doesn’t help that for an entire week our temps were well over 90 degrees (I think we even got to 100 one or two days), and that pretty much spells doom for radishes. Ah well.

I found some plans for an arched structure that is supposed to be a greenhouse, but I’ll be using it sans door/window as a shade structure with 50% shade material.  I ordered everything I need for it online except the 20′ lengths of PVC pipe, which we’ll be going to get at Home Depot later this evening.

I also designed and installed a drip system for the two beds, as the porous soaker hose was wetting everything too quickly (and not targeting the right areas), so I scrapped that and went with the 1/4″ drip system hose and such.  I still soaked the soil too fast when I was testing it and had quite a puddle of water outside the garden beds, but I adjusted the outlets so hopefully the next time I need to water (probably in a day or two), it won’t saturate too quickly and will be just right.

I’ll be glad to get the shade structure up, some of the leaves on the corn have burned on the extra hot days we had so I’d like to have it done before the next 100 degree day.  Then I’ll add a thermometer to gauge how much cooler it is under the shade structure.

I’ll have to take some new pix later; I have some from last month still on my camera, haven’t downloaded them from it yet so I don’t have anything to show at the moment.  Eventually I will though.

And I discovered something quite interesting… most of the six jalapeno pepper plants that I transplanted on Saturday, are already sprouting flower buds!  The tallest plant can’t be more than 7″ tall, so they’re still babies by all accounts.  I queried about this on a gardening forum, asking whether I should nip off all the buds or leave them be; and it was suggested that I experiment since I have six plants – nip the buds off of three of them, leave them alone on the other three, and see which plants perform better.  Okie dokie then!  Tomorrow morning while I run the water through the drip hose, I shall break out the scissors and nip off the flower buds from three of the plants.  There is at least one that had no buds at all, so I may chose that as one of the ones I nip them off of when they finally do appear (if they do before it gets larger).

On my strawberry plants, the one that did have one flower already blooming, that flower was shriveled up today, so I plucked it off.  I don’t know the age of the plants but I figure it is probably their first year, so I may pluck flowers off of one trio and leave the other three alone, like with the jalepenos, except with the strawberries it will be the entire season instead of just a couple of weeks.

The other stuff I planted was all seed, so I don’t expect anything to be popping up just yet since it has only been a day or two, but I’ll still be checking daily.