So far everything except the watermelon has made an appearance in sprouting.  I ended up transplanting 16 of the radishes that came up in pairs into an adjacent empty square, and there are still a few that have a too-close neighbor sprouting up that I’ll either need to try to transplant or thin out… that is, if the stupid springtails don’t get them first.  Today when I checked my plants, the poor little radish leaves had little itty bitty holes in some of them, and one poor thing was completely consumed.  Gah!

So I wrote to an online garden supply place that sells live pest control (you know, ladybugs, lacewings, and the like) and asked them what they thought would be the best bet against the springtails.   Hopefully I’ll hear back soon enough that I’ll be able to get an order of something in by mid-day tomorrow so it will ship quickly…

So anyway… there are corn shoots, several green onions popping up, and several carrots.  I have some new peas sprouting, although I lost three of my transplanted beans due to high winds breaking the stems (they were only about a foot high), so I started three more seeds in a baggie on the back sliding door to replace those, since the beans I planted in-ground still haven’t popped up yet.  I may have to replace two of the transplanted pea plants likewise, also due to broken stems.

I have two strawberry flowers that look like they’ll be strawberries in a couple weeks, and my cucumbers sprouted, too.  Though I’m only supposed to have one per square, so I’ll probably have to pick which one to remove.  Oh, I forgot that I still am not seeing any chives yet, either.

My transplanted pepper plants are still doing well, although they’re all still pretty darn short, I do see some new leaves on them.  Grow, peppers, grow!  My cherry tomato transplant is doing the best of the three transplants, the celebrity is doing the next best, and the better boy, I’m not sure about, it seems to be struggling.  It had some blackening leaves which I clipped off in case they were diseased and am hoping it will recover.  I DO see a couple of flower buds on it, though, as well as the other two tomato plants.  The cherry tomato’s flower buds have actually started opening, so I am thinking (hoping?) it will fruit first.

I have ordered some diatomateous earth to combat the anthills I have seen starting to pop up around my garden boxes.  I am hesitant to use the DE on the actual garden soil although it is perfectly safe for humans, I don’t want to kill off the bees that are already visiting, since for now they’re landing on the soil mostly, I presume for some water, and DE is just as deadly to them as to the other insects.  And if I end up getting some live pest control, well then that would only serve to kill off those as well, and that would be no good at all.  So as much as it pains me to see my poor little seedlings being devoured by those little beasts, I’ll have to put up with it unless I can come up with an alternate quickie fix until I can get some beneficial bugs.

I wonder how they’d do against a water/soap solution sprayed on the soil?