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. 🙂

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.