Potting On Peppers

Yesterday I really looked at my greenhouse plants. Many are stressed. My poor watermelons, that came up so beautifully in early March, are ridiculously crowded in their plastic trays. Next year: start watermelons at the end of April! They might end up being the first starts I actually have to toss in the compost pile. It's all part of the learning curve.

I also looked at my peppers and realized they had not grown much for probably the last week or two. Unlike the tomatoes, which leafed out until their leaves covered their neighbors', the peppers reached a certain size and simply stopped.

So priority one, on rising this morning, was to pot on the peppers.

By early afternoon, all 210 peppers were in 4" blocks, and I had reduced my 1700 pound bag of potting soil to a small enough amount that I could move it by hand. One hundred pounds left, perhaps? (Which is, really, just about perfect. That will produce hundreds of smaller blocks, just right for sauerkraut cabbage that I need to plant in a couple of months.)

Then I headed out to transplant greens. I had very sparse trays of cilantro, lettuce, and rainbow chard (which, I was delighted to see, had yellow rootlets and red rootlets, besides the usual white). The onion bed had grown patchy: all the beds in the photo used to be filled with four rows of onions.

I suspect that, since most of the vanished onions were the second seeding, that they dehydrated away, without the stronger root systems of their older siblings to support them. On the other hand, I didn't find any limp onion bits among the clay surface. Perhaps the roaming chickens prefer teeny onion starts over their more mature relatives? Otherwise, how could the onion tops vanish?

In any case, I read yesterday that onions and lettuce are good companions, so it seemed natural to fill in the gaps with new greens. I was all set to plant out basil, too, when I realized that basil grows a good bit taller than butterhead or onion greens, and really wouldn't be quite appropriate.

It was about 4:30 when I realized this, and I suddenly and completely lost all my energy. Perhaps hiking up and down the hills, dragging the garden cart was too much. Maybe all the hauling of water, potting soil, and 21 heavy trays of peppers simply wore me out. Perhaps I need better hydration. Food shouldn't be the issue, as I'd had almost a dozen eggs (with homemade Caesar on top, to get me more fats, which I'm craving right now). Perhaps I should imitate the "real" farmers and rise at 4am to read the Bible, milk the cow, and get breakfast ready in the dark, so I can head to the fields as the sun comes up, but that seems really extreme yet.

Not working outside in the middle of the day does sound pretty appealing, though. So I'll need to figure out how to arrange my day so it works for our family of Night Owls (excepting Jadon, the one early bird in the six Lykoshes).

After a good sit at dinner and a shower to wash off two days of intense planting, I no longer felt like a limp noodle. My ambulatory skills had returned, at least enough to get me the 40 feet from the RV to the house. Phew!