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when to transplant to the garden
Saturday, May 12 2012
Though the premature warm weather brought spring vegetation early this year, I had procrastinated the mowing of the grass far beyond how long I normally procrastinate it. But today I finally busted out the electric weed whacker and whacked all the grass into submission in the course of two major pushes. Ours is a small yard, but it takes hours to mow it with such equipment, particularly when the grass has grown as long as I'd allowed it to.
Today was also the day that I picked to begin transplanting tomatoes from their greenhouse pots into where they will live and die in the tomato patches. I started out by bringing some of the plants out of the greenhouse and putting them in the direct sun (and wind) to climatize them a bit. Several hours later I planted them in the two tomato patches: cherry tomatoes in the southmost one and non-cherry tomatoes in the northmost.
By mid-afternoon it was clear that I'd picked a bad day and time-of-day for transplanting. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the sunlight proved too intense for plants that had spent a month in the greenhouse. (The light in there tends to be a bit diffuse because of the moisture clouding the inside of the insulated glass panels, which are old ones whose seals have blown.) The tomatoes first wilted and then some of their leaves shriveled up enough that they actually looked as if they'd been burned. A better time to plant them would have been in the evening, which would have given them a whole sunless night to acclimate their roots to the new soil conditions. Better still, I should have transplanted them when cloudy conditions were in the forecast. It all seems obvious now, but I'm not the first to observe that a lot of the process of learning is the making of mistakes.
The garden today after I'd mowed around it (we're looking northward toward the tomato patches).
The biggest of my non-cherry tomatoes, planted in the newly-raised northmost tomato patch (we're looking southward).
A patch of clover near the woodshed that I didn't mow because of its propensity for producing four-leaf clovers (as well as five and six-leaf clovers).
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