Planting and transplanting

So...more on how hard it is to garden, blog, and have a full time job. I'm sure my students are grateful that I graded their papers instead of blogging in April. I did, however, keep up with the gardening even when I wasn't blogging about it. I made a good start at planting in March. Transplanting, on the other hand, didn't go so well. I made two crucial errors (other than starting my seeds too late!) First, I planted a bunch of seeds and then forgot to label them. Yikes! Then I planted a bunch more and didn't get them transplanted quickly enough to larger containers (that's where grading trumped gardening.) This failing came despite the best efforts of my friend Gabe who met with me and then emailed me wonderful, detailed instructions about how to proceed. I plan to start some seedlings for a fall planting and hope to figure out then what I did wrong in this round.

Shortly after my last blog entry, I opted to sow seed directly into the ground just so I would have something. All the pictures in this blog entry were taken between the point of my last blog entry (March 23) and the Good Friday tornado here in the Boro. We actually escaped any damage on our side of town and other than a few hours spent sitting in the hallway tracking tornado triangles on Weather Underground, we were unscathed. Others, of course, were not so lucky.

In the first round of planting, (last week in March) I planted, potatoes, collards, 3 kinds of lettuce (oakleaf, romaine, red deer tongue--and yes I bought those seeds just for the name) sugar snap peas, and swiss chard.

The sugar snap peas I planted as both seed and transplants. They were the only seedlings I had that did well. What's funny is that there is a raging argument among gardeners about whether to plant seeds or seedlings for sugar snap peas. As you'll see, both of mine ended up doing well. Not so for my poor swiss chard.
Sugar snap peas

So much bad weather rolled through middle Tennessee in early April that my poor little peas were in constant danger from hail. The day after I transplanted them, the forecast called for hail, so I covered em! With heavy stuff.
Creative sugar snap pea protection

Eventually, I added a fence for my peas and after what felt like an eternity, the first sprouts appeared. I scattered my lettuce seed so I got enormous numbers of plants too close together and have been culling them over the last few weeks and eating baby lettuce salads. mmm.
Fence for the sugar snap peas

My first potato! I couldn't be prouder...
My clumps of lettuce

I've included a picture here, too, of my azaleas. I need to be clear--I have nothing to do with their success. They are completely the result of benign neglect and whatever leaches out of the foundation of my house. Unfortunately, they were decimated by the storms of April, although beautiful while they bloomed.