Greenhouse Tragedy

Well, today was a day of serial fails. I wrote in an earlier post that the Norkotah potatoes hadn't come up yet. I was incorrect. The Norkotahs are coming up fairly well, though not as robustly as the Yukon Golds or Bintjes, but of the Rose Finns, only a single tuber has sprouted. That was fail #1.

As I worked, on the potatoes, I noticed that my second seeding of beets was coming up nicely, so I decided to check on the first seeding of beets, carrots, and onions. I peeled off the row covers, and to my considerable dismay, I found nothing but weeds in the carrot bed, two or three straggly onions, and three sad looking beets. What could have happened? All of the beets and carrots were sprouting quite happily in other beds. Well, when I pulled up the row covers, I noticed a lot of what looked like small houseflies under the cloth. After some investigation, I've concluded that they're fungus gnats, and their larvae ate all my seedlings. This is another good reason why we plant successively. Now, I've seen these gnats all over the garden, and they haven't been doing anywhere near that amount of damage in any bed that doesn't have a row cover. My guess is that the row covers were protecting the gnats from their natural predators. So I ran around and stripped all the row covers off of everything, and everything else seems fine: lettuce, gala mache, Ovation greens, and swiss chard. I left the row cover on the leeks, which were coming up nicely, because they were still so teensy. That was fail #2.

Now for the epic fail:

CRASH!

I brought these into the greenhouse last weekend after using them for the Memorial Day seedling sale. They were balanced a bit precariously, and Alex helped me shift the legs to be more stable, but clearly not stable enough. Argh. All the big tomatoes were on that shelf (which may well have contributed to its tipping over), along with the vast majority of my Sungolds. I recovered and repotted as many of the tomatoes as I could.

Survivors of the Crash

Note the completely empty shelf on bottom. Before the crash, they were all completely packed, minus one tray of Valencias I'd removed for repotting. But the worst thing about this is that, when these fell, I lost the markers for most of them. The leftmost two trays on the second shelf are all unlabeled tomatoes. I can make educated guesses, but I can't guarantee they are what I think they are, so I can't sell them. I think I'll donate them all to the Beverly Bootstraps Community Garden, if they'll take them. They're mostly Sun Golds and Bellstars, I think, both of which will do well in a community garden. I'll wait a day or two to see how many of them recover.

In every disaster, there's a teachable moment. Here's mine: use old nylons or tights to tie up your tomatoes.

Old ballet tights get a new life as tomato ties.

The fabric will stretch with the plant as it grows, supporting it without strangling it.

And lest you think the day was a total loss, I did get the potatoes mounded.

Yukon Gold (left) and Bintje potatoes in their trenches.

A single Bintje rising from the trench.

Bintje now happily mounded.

All the happy mounded potatoes.

I'll continue doing this as they grow, heaping more and more soil around the stems to encourage tuber development.

Finally, I noticed one curious difference in the Yellow Crookneck summer squash seedlings.

The pot makes a difference.

The seedling on the far right looks happy and healthy and green. The one to its left is much smaller and yellower. The difference? The one on the left is in a CowPot, and the one on the right in a coir pot. This surprised me quite a bit, since CowPots are basically both container and fertilizer in one, but perhaps they're just a bit too much fertilizer for summer squash. Other seedlings, such as zinnias, did significantly better in CowPots than in coir pots. I should do a trial next year with several different seedling varieties to see which pots work best for each species.

Well, I wanted more space in the greenhouse, and I got it with a vengeance. I did make use of the space to repot some Olympus Bell and Sweet Chocolate bell peppers, which are finally starting to shoot up, as well as the last four Little Leaf cucumbers and last two Kabocha winter squash. Tomorrow, Delicata, Lemon Basil, and, of course, more tomatoes.