The garden is planted

On Tuesday (May 17, for those of you keeping score), I finally planted my garden outside!

I had been “hardening off” my seedlings for the past several days, and when I forgot and left them out all night Monday, I figured they could survive if they were in the ground!

On Sunday afternoon, Husband and I went to Lowes and picked up some 54″ tomato cages and two 64-quart bags of Miracle-Gro Potting Mix.  I had hoped to plant everything on Monday, but it poured down rain the entire day, so I waited. 😉

Allow me to take you on a tour of my freshly-planted garden!  I made a diagram with an otherwise not-very-good photo of the main plot (southern exposure) so that I can remember which varieties of tomatoes I planted where…when the labels on my pathetic popsicle-stick plant markers fade!

As you can see, I have 5 varieties of tomatoes, a total of 8 plants in the plot.  Of the five varieties, only the Jelly Bean is new this year. There are pepper plants on each corner, and the corn is planted in hills along the back of the plot.

Since there wasn’t enough room in the plot for everything we wanted to grow, I also planted things in our pots (from previous years), hence the potting soil.

three pots of cucumbers on the front side of the fence

two pots of zucchini (left) and two pots of watermelon (right) on the back side of the fence

I’ll train the cucumbers and zucchini (maybe) to grow up the fence (I’ll add strings for support once they get going).  In a previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t know much about whether watermelons would work in pots, but a search on growing watermelons in containers yielded this link, which confirmed that Sugar Baby watermelons (the variety we have) are one of the varieties that can do okay in a pot. (And just for the record, searching on “sugar baby watermelon yield per vine” took me to this site, from which I gather we’ll have about 3 per plant, if they survive).  I’m pretty sure that the pots are placed in sunny locations, but I will be keeping an eye on them, and I’ll move them if it looks like I chose their spots poorly.

You didn’t think I forgot about the herbs and lettuce, did you?

herbs, lettuce, and a lone pepper plant

These smaller pots are on our back deck (western exposure).  In the photo above, the top row, from left to right, contains: basil, a pepper plant, and Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce.  The bottom row, from left to right, contains: flat-leaf parsley (not looking so hot from when I transplanted it… hopefully it perks up!), chives, curly parsley, and a Mesclun mix of lettuce.  After planting all the big and little pots, I had leftover potting soil, another biggish pot, and another pepper seedling, so that’s why a pepper got mixed into the herbs and lettuce 🙂

Let me tell you, I have *definitely* seen signs of our little tree-rat friends (squirrels) in these pots.  Not 2 hours later, I noticed that the little rascals had been digging in the pots, especially the ones with the lettuce.  ::sigh::  I wonder if these plants will survive?  I have seen a little bit of evidence of animal digging in the main plot, but not as much, thankfully.  We’ll see!  As a precaution, when I planted my seedlings, which I started two-to-an-egg-carton-space), I left both of them intact.  If I had been more sure of animals leaving my garden alone, I would have thinned them immediately, but I’m going to wait for a bit and see what survives.