Today was our second big planting day, and after this we are going to have a bit of a lull for a couple weeks. I hope so, anyway!

The biggest vegetable area we had to plant was Bed 4, which is the Eggplant Trial and the Vertical Garden. Here we have all the eggplant laid out for planting. We planted 2 each of 7 different varieties. Most of the plants were looking a little rough, but they should perk up quickly after being planted. I haven’t seen any signs of flea beetles or cucumber beetles yet this spring, so that should be helpful. Last year we replanted two or three times because the poor eggplant kept getting eaten up by the cucumber beetles. We’ll keep an eye out!

This year we only have 2 of the cattle panel trellises in our vertical garden area. We wanted to take a break from so many vine crops this year. The third trellis is the one that is acting as our vegetable arbor between the Kids’ Garden and the Vertical Garden. The arbor trellis will have a cucumber and a tomato on it. The other two trellises are planted to melons, one variety on each side of each trellis. We have a couple of watermelons, which should be fun to try.

One of the watermelons, the Yellow Mini-Tiger, is a seedless yellow-fleshed watermelon. Seedless watermelons require planting of a pollinator. The seed packet had a separate envelope inside for the pollinator seeds. We planted the pollinators in the middle of the trellis and the variety seeds on either end. We market the pollinator with a stake so that we are sure to replant if the seeds don’t germinate. The seeds only had a 56% germination rate, so the company sent us an extra packet and we planted a couple more seeds than normal in each spot.

We planted the basil sections of Bed 1, even though the plants were so small. I hadn’t even put them out to get hardened off yet, so we’ll see how they like the 93 degree heat today! I hope we don’t lose too many of them.

We had time, so we put the tomato cages in place. We aren’t quite ready to mulch yet, so we didn’t put the stakes in and tie them up with zip ties. We’ll probably mulch and do that in a couple more weeks.

We also planted the Prairie Star Annuals today. They primarily went in the different containers around the garden, in the Quiet Garden, and a few in other nooks and crannies of the garden.

We made sure to give everything a dose of starter fertilizer and then a good drink of water in addition, since the forecast is predicting hot weather today and for a few more days this week.