K&R+X

A couple of the tomato plants have come up and one of the Little Gem lettuce plants. The others will hopefully be up soon. Once they are up and a bit bigger we’ll start hardening them off by putting them outside during the day. Then we’ll transplant them into the Earthboxes. That’ll be nice, for one thing it’ll get the Earthboxes out from under foot!

On my walk home from work yesterday I got caught in a drenching downpour with hail for a few minutes. It was a drenching reminder that the weather hasn’t entirely improved yet. After that cloud passed the sun came out and there was a wonderful rainbow. The only camera I had on me was by Sony Clie so the image quality doesn’t do it justice but it did catch the rainbow.

This morning I was able to plant the remaining plants:

• The Little Gem Lettuce
• Fine Verde Basil
• Genovese Basil
• And, a free gift from the good folks at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed, Thai Pink Egg Tomato! “Delicious, grape tomatoes from Thailand, “The Land of Smiles!” The crisp pink fruit are bursting with natural goodness, sweet and rich. This tomato is popular all over the Kingdom. The brilliant pink grape shaped, 1 oz. fruit are perfect for fresh markets, restaurants and more! Good yields and fruit is uniform.” That was a nice surprise.

The big question mark is how well will these plants do? The porch isn’t necessarily the best place for plants. It gets pretty good sun (when it’s out), but it isn’t ideal. Next year, if we can get into a house, it’ll be nice to have a larger garden. Even so the Earthboxes would be nice for a kitchen garden or other plants in areas that can’t otherwise be planted (decks, concrete areas, etc).

Now we’re waiting for them to come up and get large enough to transplant. Outside everything is growing like crazy with fresh leaves, buds, and flowers. I’m looking forward to seeing our plants develop.

This morning I planted four Quadrato d’Asti Rosso peppers, one Cocozella di Napoli, and one Early Prolific Straightneck. We’re going to stagger the plantings a bit. We need to get these started so the plants can be repotted into the Earthboxes in a few weeks.

A bit battered.



But the EarthBoxes are fine.

Our EarthBoxes arrived — three days ago! The FedEx delivery person didn’t leave us a note or anything and I hadn’t gotten an email from the EarthBox folks to tell us they’d already shipped them so we didn’t know until the apartment manager called about the three HUGE boxes in her office. 🙂

Kate managed to get the boxes over here but they were pretty heavy. They also hadn’t been shipped carefully, the cardboard boxes were battered and torn. The contents, however, were fine. Five EarthBoxes complete with everything except the seeds or plants and water. We’re going to get more plants started and then will be replanting them into the boxes before too much longer.

With the Earthboxes on the way I planted our first tomato plants this morning (indoors) to get them started for when the boxes arrive. The plants are Emerald Evergreen tomatoes from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co..

From their catalog:

“Medium-large fruit that stay “evergreen”. This heirloom variety was introduced by Glecklers Seedsmen around 1950. The large plants set heavy yields of these beauties having lovely lime-green color. The flavor is rich and superbly sweet. It’s one of the best. A popular market variety, now being sold in many upscale stores.”

The other plants we’ll be planting are:

• Early Prolific Straightneck. “45 days. AAS Winner from 1938, uniform lemon yellow, club-shaped fruit, firm flesh is of excellent quality, tasty.”
• Cocozella di Napoli. “55 days. Long, slender fruit, ribbed, pale greenish-yellow, striped with dark green, very firm and flavorful flesh, a unique Italian heirloom, tasty.”
• Quadrato d’Asti Rosso. “80 days. Very thick, brilliant red flesh, the fruit are huge with delicious rich-sweet taste. Excellent for frying, salads or stuffing, one of the largest red bells, beautiful and blocky, The perfect pepper for home and market growers, produces large yields. Very popular with many fine markets in Italy. Superb!”
• Fine Verde Basil. “Very small, fine leaves on compact bushes; great for containers. Perfect rich, spicy basil flavor that Italians love.”
• Italian Sweet Basil. This one I picked up at the store and grew some in containers on the window sill with mixed results. I’ll try it in the Earthbox to see if it does better.
• Genovese Basil. “The famous Italian heirloom is very popular with many cooks. “
• Little Gem Lettuce. “Very small green romaine-type, one of the very best tasting lettuces. A superb heat tolerant variety that is sure to please! “

We plan to stagger planting times and when the weather starts to turn cooler we’ll plant cool weather crops. We may also use row covers to extend the season longer in the Fall/Winter months. Of course we’ll be posting pictures. Our small porch won’t be able to produce a whole lot but it should be interesting to see how much we can grow and how well the plants grow in that location. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the squirrels at bay!