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?

Well, with the exception of some flower seeds, but everything else is in as of yesterday afternoon.  I transplanted the pea & bean sprouts I had going in the window, although I think I broke the stem of one of the pea plants.  If it doesn’t recover I’ll just put a sugar snap in its place.  Hopefully though, these most recent transplants do alright.  There isn’t too much of a difference between the temperature indoors on the windowsill compared to outside right now, except they were sitting behind a high-UV blocking screen and now they have full-blast UV from the sun.  I’ll check them later when I get home to see how they did.

I did acclimate them a little bit, I placed them outside for a few hours on Saturday but since they were in peat pots the soil dried out pretty quickly so they were a bit wilted when I brought them back into the house, but they perked up after being watered. 

I also re-did my drip hose.  I had first fashioned two of them out of a 50′ length of rubber drip hose but those didn’t cover well enough, so I bought a 75′ length of a different type of drip hose and have it snaked across the gap between the two beds so I wouldn’t have to cut it.  I put the drip hose through about a 4′ length of swimming pool vacuum hose that we aren’t using anymore to keep the water that would drip from the section over the gap from hitting the ground, and propped that up over some taller buckets so the water trickles out into either ofthe two beds.  Not a pretty set up, but it works and the coverage is better.  And it doesn’t take long for it to get things properly watered, and whatever it misses, I can hand-water.

I still need to figure out the shade though.  This week it’s nice and in the low to mid 80s, but it will reach the 90s before too long.