It’s been just under a month since I planted most if not all the seeds and did the transplants of the tomatoes, peppers and strawberry plants.  Everything is growing prettty well, the tomato plants are taller and the Better Boy has two tomatoes growing on it, and the cherry tomato plant has one tomato growing so far.  There are two little strawberries on one plant, and while the peppers have been flowering despite their short stature, only one so far has a jalapeno growing; on the others the flowers fell off, either with it being too hot for a couple of days, or being attacked by spider mites (which I did see on those plants).

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. 🙂