Guest Gardeners at Planting Out Time: Getting all those seedlings into the garden.

Getaway Garden had its first ever "guest gardeners" helping out this past week as planting out time had finally arrived and it was time to get those seedlings out of the greenhouse and into the dirt!  Big thank-yous to my sister-in-law, my step mom, my dad and my brother, and also to a guy from our church, who all got involved. Some with planting seedlings, and watering, others with re-rototilling and raking, and setting fence posts for the new fence.  Their efforts helped me a great deal, and though I had a few things left to do myself afterwards, I am very happy to say everything is planted and lookin' good!

Here are a few final pictures of how things looked in the greenhouse just before we moved them outside--nice healthy and good green color. Not shown--those troublesome pepper plants--bell peppers only reached 4 inches in height by now but they were put out in the garden anyways just to see if they get bigger and produce.  I went ahead and bought a few bell pepper plants as well as sweet banana peppers and jalepenos which didn't sprout for me at all.

Squash Plants

Tiny Herbs

Tomatoes

Beans!

Of course the few days that it was not thunder storming and we could get out there and work in the gardens, the temperature shot up to 90+ degrees--which is not particularly conducive to transplanting anything, let along fragile veggie plants!  So, some of the plants, cucumbers especially, are looking slightly sunburned and struggling.  Good news though--today I noticed that some beans and some jalepeno peppers are beginning to flower already!  

They don't really look like much now, but here are a couple of views of our gardens with their rows of small plants.  Notice the bare fence posts that are in place around Second Garden--we are hoping to get that fence, which will look like the one around First Garden, finished this week in order to keep the deer and ground hogs from having a buffet!

First Garden

Second Garden--view 1

Second Garden-view 2

I haven't yet taken a final count of the number of plants we actually put in, but there are A LOT, and I also gave away a bunch of plants to friends and family who are putting in gardens of their own.

The last task after installing all of the plants is routing all the hoses and sprinklers to do the watering.  Something I have been working toward for several years is to be able to water my entire edible garden(s) WITHOUT having to drag the hoses and move the sprinklers every time...This year I have finally reached that goal too with the addition of 2 new hoses and 1 more "rainbow"style sprinkler, and the soaker hoses I received for birthday gifts.  Hoses now run from the outdoor faucet on the house--under/across the driveway through a rigid PVC tube buried under the stone--around the kids playground--and to a manifold near the greenhouse (which will hopefully be mounted on a post soon instead of lying in the dirt).  The manifold allows one in and several out lines each controlled separately by a lever. Obviously we do not have enough water pressure to run everything at the same time but this way each section can be turned on/off easily and without getting me getting dirty!  From this splitter, I have one hose running to the First Garden which feeds a single rainbow-style (for lack of a better term--you know what I mean--the kind that have an arch and go back and forth) sprinkler that is able to cover the whole First Garden.  On other connections of the manifold I have the soaker hoses that zigzag through the potato rows, and 2 more lines have hoses to the 2 sprinklers that water the Second Garden.  The final outlet works my short coiled hose for filling watering cans and watering things in the greenhouse.   I prefer to thoroughly water the gardens in the mornings--early enough though that the leaves will dry some before the hot sun scorches them. Watering in the morning is better for the plants and lessens the likely hood of disease which can occur if the plants are wet at night. That being said--on these extremely hot days everything gets a good drink morning and night unless we have rain.

AND NOW....we wait.....again......