Remembering the Fallen

Yesterday, I made a last-ditch attempt to rescue some of my seedlings. It's at least another week before I put out the first of the hardiest of the summer seedlings (tomatoes) and probably two or three before I think about eggplant, peppers, or cucumbers. So a little tidying up was in order.
Two 4' shelves seems like a lot of space when you begin planting things, but as the plants expand, the space quickly becomes tighter and tighter. Sacrifices must be made. Up-potting must be done (again). And as in eany good expansion effort, some must give their lives to the cause.
There's the eggplant that the cat ate the first leaves right off of. The Sandia pepper I accidentally brushed with the force of falling water. The tomato I crushed with my elbow. The tomato I forgot that was sandwiched behind the bigger, meaner tomatoes (I'll get to them in a moment) and so, cut off from water and light, shrank to nothing. The cucumber that got caught in a draft on a cold spring night, and remained sullen for weeks - it was just recovering when I ripped it out so I could rescue a pepper from the clutches of the giant tomato plants. An eight-pack of onions, and another of nasturtiums, given for the same cause.
A mass dispersal was necessary because some of my tomatoes have grown large and mean under their pampered conditions. Without the aid of fertilizer, they grew stews thicker than pencils, branches that extended across the lights, and tendrils that shaded out shorter, less aggressive plants - mostly eggplant and pepper, but even some of the smaller tomatoes. These bullies are almost exclusively Fedco heirlooms tomatoes. I don't know if it's the freshness of the seed (most of the other seed was packed for 2006 or 2007), or the variety (Big Mean Bully will be the name of my first created cultivar), or what - I treated these tomatoes exactly the same as the others. To be fair, one of my yellow tomatoes (Giant Yellow Gourmet Stuffer, I think) is also large, but less invasive. My tomatillos are very happy, too, but my peppers and eggplant remain healthy but not enormous. So the shorter plants got moved into space vacated by less important plants. It gave me a chance to eat a large portion of plants - onions, nasturtiums, cucumber roots, a basil, a thyme, a lemon balm. Sort of a weird impromptu salad. It was fun.
Pepper update: I have *one* Sandia pepper sprout, among 12 seeds planted. I'm praying it survives. I have two Thai hots, two Georgia Flames, and a couple others, but peppers are definitely not the winning species at Chez Chick. I overplanted on the seed, with good results for everything else, but not so much with the peppers. I know the germination is supposed to be erratic, but still.
So: several small tomatoes I hope will thrive eventually, plus 4-7 big tomatoes I have high hopes for, plus a few "rescues" that replanted themselves and thus have been allowed to live for awhile. 2 enthusiastic tomatillos. 5-6 eggplants that seem very happy, plus one or two that don't. 6ish peppers, plus rescues. Sage, thyme, lovage, 10ish happy basil plants, 2 sullen holy basils. All in all, not a bad haul. If even 25% of these make out, I should have home-grown tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and herbs. If they all do, I will have to start sneaking around the farmer's market, dropping eggplants and tomatoes into baby carriages and unattended bags. Next year, I want to start peppers earlier, and tomatoes later. The eggplants have worked out fine.
Interesting note: Cucumber roots have an aftertaste *just like* cucumber. Who knew?

So a gardener walks into a plot . . .

Monday I found my plot. For one thing, it's quite a bit smaller than I expected; 14x23', roughly. (Yes, I took my tape measure.) That's about half the size I'd been planning on, so that throws things off. Most of that area I had planned to put in beans and squash, so I have to decide what I'm going to do without. Potatoes, probably, for starters, and much fewer/no carrots and parsnips and other veggies that require loose soil.

My plot's pretty new; it was only cultivated for the first time last year, by people who my neighbor described as "planting a whole bunch of stuff and vanishing." It shows; the remaining stalks showed that something grew last year. I found plastic tags indicating tomatoes and peppers (the boring kind you get from the greenhouse). And there are two onions that somehow survived the winter without protection of any kind. I hate to take them out, but they're in the middle of my planned beds, and I need to dig in stuff around them.

There's a fair amount of junk I need to haul away; bottles, broken plant containers, and random trash. I scratched my arm pretty badly pulling up one of those hideous short green mesh fences with SHARP WIRE EDGES. Thank goodness I remember my last tetanus shot (May 2005) - sometimes travel has peripheral advantages. I took out the worst of the weeds, piled up most of the organic matter from weeds and dead tomatoes on one end of the plot (to be hauled/composted), and dug up a bed approximately 14x2.5'. One wheelbarrow provided ~1 inch of organic matter, and a healthy quantity of worms. I put in a few onions, a sprinkle of forget-me-nots, and a few salad greens.

I'm seriously considering tilling - just once. There can't be that much microlife in the soil now; I found an entirety of one worm in the clay I disturbed. Not a good ratio at all. I've been reading a lot about not tilling, to avoid disturbing the fungi hyphae, which create a giant web throughout the undisturbed soil, doing all sorts of good things for plants and bacteria, but physically loosening and mixing in compost is incredibly difficult work, and I'm not convinced that the bed I "prepared" is properly prepped at all. It should have been better mixed and loosened deeper.

Something bit me, and my arm is now covered in lovely strawberry-pink dots. (I was examining this in class while my prof was lecturing on the dangers of Scarlet Fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other Really Scary Diseases. Allergies pale in comparison to those scary things, but I did spend an unhappy few hours last night wondering why I had neglected to stock my medicine cabinet with hydrocortisone cream. Fun fact: vodka, applied topically, actually helps with the itching. Another fun fact: Just because you enjoy putting your hands in mulch, dirt, and weeds doesn't necessarily mean that's the best idea you ever had.

Also, one Red Ruffled Eggplant is up (barely, as of this morning). This is a Hmong variety, which is appropriate considering the large Hmong population in the area. I really want my Purple Laos to sprout; I haven't given up hope, although I'm beginning to wonder about some of the tomatoes I planted two-three weeks ago. The radish seeds I planted Sunday were up last night; I knew they were fast-sprouting, but that's *awesome*. They're very cute. (And doomed; they're part of my indoor green collection, which is destined to be added to the rice cooker as an American version of Seven-Herb Rice Porridge, a traditional Japanese food for the 7th of January. It's not the 7th of January, of course, but then it's not going to have seven herbs, either.

Seeds in the Office

My apartment is dark. Not quite "I live in a basement" but definitely no sunny windowsills to be found. My glass looks east across a brief grassy stretch (I'm being generous here) onto a brick wall and into my neighbor's dining room. (Interesting stuff, other people's eating habits.) There's also a tree nearby. As a result, the "put seeds in a sunny spot" doesn't work for me, despite the assumption of every gardening book I've read that everyone has several wide, clutter-free, sunny windowsills ripe for quickening.
However, my office does, in fact, have exactly such a spot. It's southern facing. It gets loads of sun, filtered only by blinds which could easily be pulled up. There's also 9-10 hours of fluorescent lights. The ledge is a good 4-5" wide, and of course there's a corner of my desk as well. I don't think bringing in flats of seedlings would be wise, but what would be wrong with a few appropriately spaced pepper and tomato seedlings? And some basil. And maybe a rosemary. And, of course, the ubiquitous spider plant. And marjoram is supposed to keep away unwanted visitors - could it be this easy to keep out wandering students and staff?
People have done more with less, that's for sure.