this one is for chris j.....

its been awhile since i have posted, primarily because not a whole lot has happened in the garden. at nearly 1900 foot elevation, even planting on farmer freds bday (april 28) is a chancy option - but my tomatoes are percolating along and i have some pictures for an update.

my seed guy - keith - has done a good job this year, although we lost our first batch of seedlings; keith bought seed warming mats and that solved our problem. in the off season, keith worked on soil mixes (he rolls like that) and believes he has a good soil that allows good growth - organically. looking at those seedlings, i would say he is right. i will get them in a couple weeks and start hardening them off and hopefully they will be in the ground the first part of may.

some garden activities that have occurred - i have been pulling out burr clover that has popped up in the beds and i did land a bunch of blue berries and some more fruit trees. i will check the digicam to see if i have pics of those tasks to put up here too.

2009 seedling update

'keith' continues to work hard on our seedlings and he sent me a recent update. as you can see, they are coming along just fine.

'keith' rigged up a pretty cool frame to hold the grow lights - he's keeping this rig on a low budget and i believe he has done a dandy job.

i might even be able to get something like this going some years off - when we get the den cleared out.

2009 seeds that we have started

as i mentioned in a previous post, i usually buy tomato starts. primarily for 2 reasons - 1, i am not setup properly to do the seed thing and 2, i could be sure of getting the varieties of tomatoes i wanted. that changed in 2008. i looked for and could not find 'sweet million' cherry tomato and i found sun gold. knowing that i absolutely had to have sun gold in the garden for 2009, wanting to try sweet million and finding a sport of sun gold - sun sugar - i had to ensure my 2009 garden had those varieties.

enter a new hire at the firm where i work. lets call him 'keith' to hide his true identity. soon after he was hired, 'keith' and i intersected on some computing work and in general conversation between troubleshooting we found that we had a shared interest - nay, not an interest - a passion for gardening!

we talked shop - garden shop - and soon found we could help each other out in our gardening endeavors. his gardening space is near zero for the short term, but he had seed starting gear. i have an abundance of space - and no seed starting gear. so a plan was hatched. he would be the seed starter guy and i would grow the plants this year keeping him well equipped with tomatoes throughout the summer.

my order to totally tomatoes rocketed off - across the ether, via the internet and 10 days later we were in business. 'keith' quickly got to work and we had plants shortly there after. as you can see, he has a pretty sweet setup and thanks to his wife's high tolerance for his garden geekiness (my wife has the same trait) we will be ready for transplants in late april.

these are the seeds 'keith' got going

• sungold cherry tomato
• sunsugar cherry tomato
• sweet million cherry tomato
• jet sonic medium size tomato (free pkt)
• gemini sweet bell pepper
• lilac sweet bell pepper
• purple beauty sweet bell pepper
• a pepper variety similar to a hungarian pepper (free pkt)

a big shout out to 'keith' for his help and eagerness to raise these seeds. stay tuned for seedling progress.