I checked my garden when I got home, mostly to see how the transplants of the peas and beans fared.  The pea plant I broke seems to be a possible lost cause, but the other three are still OK.  I discovered that one of the bean plants was bent in half, like I had done to the pea plant, except this one I had not done.  Gah!  I propped it back up on the chop-stick I had tied it to, but I’m not hopeful.  Dang it!

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. 🙂

I decided to start small and only bought enough wood for two 4’x4′ boxes.  I built those over the course of two days; the first one I did without pre-drilling guide holes for the deck screws, which I do not ever recommend anyone try – it literally gave me a headache by the time I was done.  The second one I had purchased some drill bits (I already had the drill, but it was packaged primarily as a screwdriver so didn’t come with any drill bits) so that I could make the guide holes, which made the process a whole lot faster and easier.  And no headache!

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