Squash soup day 76 (and some other stuff)

Greeeeeetings! It's been a while since my last post. This is mostly due to the fact that I was off in Copenhagen for a work thing. If you haven't been there, I highly recommend it! The people are wonderful, the food is great, the beer is brilliant, and the city itself is beautiful. The highlight of the trip for me was the last night when I got caught up in an all night karaoke extravaganza with an Australian statistician and two U.S. Marines at Sam's Bar (this was even more fun that it sounds!).

Be that as it may, the relevant bit of this was that I had to devise an ingenious system to keep all my seedlings alive (one of which is the mythic potimarron squash I've been nuturing). Unfortunately, the weather forecast when I left called for rain the whole week, so I devised my system with this in mind, but of course the sun shone the whole week and it was the hottest stretch of the year so far. Luckily, all the plants made it through some how, so here's a post where they get put in the garden.

Here are the squash seedlings. They came up a few days before I left and have been chugging along merrily. They've been outside ever since the leaves came out, so there is no need to harden them off before they go in the ground.

The first step is to dig a hole about the same size as the pot.

Then pop the plants out of their pot. Just flip the pot upside down, cradling the seedlings between your fingers, and give the bottom a whack. Nice roots, eh?

Pop the root ball in the hole. (I do a lot of popping in the garden.)

And firm it in gently. Voila! Soup's on in 3 months or so!!

If you have dumb birds in your neighbourhood who like to dig up plants for no reason, some sticks are a good idea. Just make a little pile over the seedling to make it difficult for the birds to get in there. If they're lazy and dumb, you should be ok.

I also decided to put my tomatoes in today. Here they are getting laid out to check for spacing etc...

For tomatoes, you want to plant them deep ("up to their necks"). This lets them throw roots out from the buried stem part and helps make them more vigorous. To pull this off you should trim the lower leaves from the seedling. I just pinch them off. I was thinking that it is probably a good idea to do this a few days before you put the plants in so the stem can heal over, but I had this brainwave a little late.

Just pop (see?) your tomato into the deep hole, then...

...fill it in and firm it down a little. Lovely!

And here they all are, nice and cozy and ready for another predicted week of rain. This is a new garden bed, so I think the soil is fertile enough to get these cats going. If it was an older bed, I would have dumped a scoop or two of manure in each hole too. Also, if it is an older bed where there has been trouble with tomato leaf blight, I'd mulch the transplants right now with a good layer of straw or something. Leaf blight gets into the plant when rain splashes the virus up from the soil onto the leaves. Mulch helps keep the splashing from happening and saves your little darlings from a summer of misery.

Elsewhere in the garden, things are humming along nicely. I was particularly impressed by my hop plant. Last summer it was new to the garden and just sat there and pouted the whole time. This year it came up strong and ready to roll! Three cheers for hops!! Speaking of which...

...cheers!