The Seeds have Sprouted!

Yes, it's another post about the garden.  This time of year is always when there's a big push to get everything in.

The good news is that Ben has insisted we break my usual text-only contributions by adding some of his (very beautiful) photographs.  He has been enjoying the new camera and learning about gardens.  

I got up early and watered the garden before we went on a short road trip to pick up parts for a Big Turner Project.  So I know for a fact there were no seeds up at 8:00 yesterday morning.  

But by 2:30 in the afternoon when I got home and watered the seeds again...we had seedlings!  I texted Ben and he sent back a message that said, "Woohoo!  Yippee!!"

Our little road trip took us up to Marlette and on the way we noticed a number of small nurseries along the road.  Given the much more rural area and all the farms about, we had a suspicion that visiting a farm nursery might yield us better prices and a bigger selection on vegetable seedlings we wanted to buy, so after we picked up the parts we stopped at one just outside Imlay City.  They had more varieties of tomatoes in one place than I've ever seen before, along with pretty much every other garden vegetable we could want in a couple of small, inconspicuous greenhouses.  The other part of the business is selling golf carts, which is what caught our eye.  Something unusual about seeing a hundred golf carts all parked in a big lot together!

After looking at every plant, we chose canning tomatoes, Roma tomatoes (special request from Dad Turner), green peppers, banana peppers (yes, we really are addicted...), and a zucchini plant.  We decided on tomatoes and peppers that were specially labeled "high yield" and picked out nice stocky, healthy little plants.  We almost lost them on the way home, too: when making a patented Abrupt-Ben-Turn-Into-Wendy's-Parking-Lot, one of our stacks of parts fell over on the tomatoes.  Good thing they're young flexible vines and just bent over instead of breaking.

Wendy's, by the way, has begun making a baked sweet potato side dish with cinnamon butter that is quite definitely the best sweet potato I've ever eaten.  Wow.

We waited until after dinner to plant so the seedlings would get the benefit of recovering from shock in the cool of the night rather than the full blown heat of the afternoon.  Judging by their appearance this morning, it was a good tactic: they look pretty happy in their new homes.

So.  Garden in, maintenance begun (I've already had to begin weeding...), next project: the big weed patch smack in the middle of the back yard where there used to be a perennial garden.  It is a truly magnificently awful sight at the moment.  Maybe Ben will take some pictures.