Baby Ducks. 4.6.22

Ning's baby ducks.  After watching them a few days, he thinks two might be males.   I don't know how to tell the difference except time will tell.

Main Crop Potato Starts Arrived. 4.5.22

 The potato starts I ordered from Fedco in Maine arrived yesterday.  I opened them and havecthem in the sunroom to pre-sprout (chit).

Envol are super early producers. "The earliest of the Early".  Yukon Gem is an updated version of Yukon Gold - a little later but more disease resistant and more productive,

Sorya is a German variety, Yellow flesh, midseason, long keeping that produces well with low fertility soils.  Kennebec is mid season, so far my favorite of all potato varieties.

The seed potatoes all look about the same so I wont add more photos.  I also bought a late season variety, Elba - white flesh, disease resistant, and supposedly very long keeping type potato.

I'll need to prepare some more area for them.  This is enough for five long rows and I've only prepared two rows so far.

Peppers, Eggplants, Thyme. 4.3.22

 Here are some of the peppers and eggplants that are sunning outside today.  They are behind the tomatoes in growth, even though I started them earlier.

Behind them are the Rosemary cuttings.  I think two will grow.  The other doesn't look so good.

There are still lots of pepper and eggplant seedlings in six-packs to up-pot.  I do a few each day.

This is the thyme six-pack that I started later.  I think these are bigger than the earlier starts now.  The reason is it was still too cold when I planted the earlier thyme outside.

I think the others will be OK, just set back a bit from their time in the cold.

Flower Seedling Plants. 4.3.22

 The flower seedling and cutting starts are doing pretty good. 

These are carnations, statice, bloodflower, milkweed, late started coreopsis, ratibida (Mexican hat flower), later started oregano, and later started thyme.

These are mostly geraniums.  The more lush ones are mostly starts from cuttings last fall.  The puny looking ones were starts from this winter.

The big planter / container box is done, and the containers are 1/3 full of soil.  When they are full, two of the ten will get flowers (carnations and statice), two will get Serrano peppers, and four will get bush beans.  Im not sure about the remaining two, maybe shallots in one and a bush tomato in the other.

Tomato Seedlings Growing Fast. 4.3.22

The tomato plants are in Black Gold potting soil.  For most, I'm using taller pots, 4" across, so they don't get root bound too fast.  There are still about 6 weeks before they can go into the ground. These are all slicing tomato and a few cherry tomato plants.

It's a lot of plants, but about half are for gifts.  

At this early stage, the dwarf types are easily distinguished from regular height plants.

The three on the left are dwarf, the two on the right are not dwarf.  The far left plant is "CC McGee", a "potato - leaf" dwarf.  

The one exception is Reisentraube, which so far is as small as the dwarf types, even though they are a regular height - type plant.

All were in the sun for a few hours yesterday.  They looked fine afterwards.  In fact, I think the leaf color looks better.    They will be in the sun for most of the day today, too.  I'm actually hoping that the dwarf plants can be in pots longer than the regular height plants, to give me more time.