Planting Tomato, Pepper and Cucumber Plants

Here's the post I referenced last week! I'm gonna share my little tricks for what I did THIS year when planting my veggie seedlings into the garden.


CUCUMBERS:

 One of the first  and most important things to remember with cucumbers, is that they are part of the same  family as melons and squash. Their foliage is very tender, and ideally it doesnt really like to have nights below 15 degrees! So don't do your squashes ON the may long weekend (which we are well past now). It's best to wait a couple weeks, simply so they don't get too shocked by transplant plus chilled by cooler nights still.

With all three of these plants, the first step is digging the holes. If your garden is smaller, I'd still start here. But mainly with a row garden, the importance of digging before planning, is that you space out your plants before you've decided how many to grow! I find, if I'm just plopping the plants down on the soil to plan out their locations, I'll usually put them too close together. They look small and I'm not instinctively planning for their eventual size. But when I leave the plants aside, I can just dig holes based on how big I know the eventual plants will be. Cucumbers, for example, vine. So every few plants, I'll give a tomato cage for a trellis, simply to provide room for me to plant more varieties of cucumbers in my space. But with tomatoes, there's no getting around the fact that each plant needs roughly 3 feet of room when doing a row garden. (in square-foot-gardening, the reason you can plant them closer together is the nutrition quality of the soil you use)

Step two for cucumbers (and tomatos and peppers) is still NOT laying down the plants by their holes! Given how hot and dry our spring was, the next step is to WATER THE HOLE! Not the plant. :) Before any plant goes into the hole, stand there with the hose and start pouring water into each hole, until it is full enough to be a squirrel's swimming pool. It'll eventually soak down, even if it takes 5-10 minutes to do so. You want to saturate the soil below your plants to encourage them to grow roots DOWN. Not up towards surface watering.

Now we're at the part where most folks start. Now that you have prepped holes, you can begin to lay out your plants. In my case, I had way more than I needed, so that's also why I started with holes instead of my lay-out. I am doing a full row of cucumbers this year, where I only did half a row last year. I like to be generous with my harvest, and last year, we really only had enough for ourselves and a couple neighbors. (and if you know me, you know that's simply not enough! lol!). So once my holes were dug and watered, I settled on 3-4 of each variety of cucumber, and set them in their places.

 as you can see above, the water will eventually soak in. It also usually makes the hole shallower than it started off, so it's a good idea to dig your hole a little deeper than you need it.

After that, you are just transplanting your seedling. Put a finger on either side of the stem of your plant, resting your fingers on the soil. Not the seedling. Turn the pot upside down, and begin squeezing all the sides and tapping on the bottom. Your seedling should pop right out of the container, with no force or trauma to the stem this way. With cucumbers, try not to disturb the roots. They don't like transplanting.

Gently work the soil back in around the cucumber plant, and then give the plant another drink to moisten the top layer of soil surrounding the root ball.

PEPPERS!

There's really not much to say about peppers other than the above! Peppers you can do a little bit closer together than cucumbers yet, as the eventual plants aren't as large. Here you can see i've chosen to make a wider row, by zig-zaging my plants a bit. This allows me to put them closer together but allow each plant more space still, in the diagonal style.

Again, dig your holes first, water them, then lay out your plants, transplant them and water the tops. This year I am doing 3 varieties of peppers. Jalapinos, green peppers, and  weaver's mennonite stuffing peppers (which is like the cherry tomato of the peppers family basically. Tiny bell peppers.)

**DISCLAIMER! I've never had great luck with peppers, so if you have other tips or tricks please pass them along!!

TOMATOES! 

So here i've dug and watered my holes, and laid out my tomato plants. Dig your tomato holes much deeper than cucumber or peppers. The roots tend to be larger, and you'll want to bury some of the plant's stem in the soil yet as well! Tomatoes create roots from the little hairs on the stem. So the more stem you can bury, the stronger root system your plant will develop. Plus you are setting those larger roots much deeper down in the soil, right from the get-go, giving them a more stable temperature and moisture level.

Here's where some of our scrap-saving comes in. I added 4 things to my holes this year for tomatoes.
1: worm castings: these are just a very nice rich source of composted nutrients. A little soil boost.
2: egg shells: These are ground into powder so that they will break down quicker. They provide calcium which can help prevent blossom end rot (something my plants struggled with last year!)
3: coffee grinds: rich in nitrogen, used coffee grinds provide good stuff for sweeter tomatoes and higher yield.

That's 3 things...

 The fourth thing is aspirin! :) It supposedly helps to prevent diseases in the young plants!

 Crush up the aspirin into a fine powder, and add a pinch to each of your holes. Ideally 1 tablet per hole, or a bit less. Don't overdo it. I used 30 pills for 55 holes.

You can see I didn't quite get a full powder affect on mine, but once the pinch was added, i stirred it into my other 3 additives thoroughly, and watered it well to dissolve. 

 Now we are ready to transplant! (yes, all of this takes a long time. I used three full evenings to plant my 55 tomato plants.).  Firstly, we are going to prune off the bottom two branches on our tomato plant. You can see the tiny fuzzy hairs on the stem in this photo. The more stem we bury, the better root system we will have, remember? So go the bottom leaves! :)

Now it's just like the other plants. Into the hole, and surround with dirt.

Lastly, (and relevant to ALL your seedlings) is to shape the soil around your young plant to create a sort-of mote. Then when you water, all the water will go directly to your young plant, and not just dribble away from it. You want to baby these suckers for a while, till they take over.

And there it is! I realize its counter-intuitive to break off branches and bury the stem. It makes the plants look so tiny at first as opposed to what they were in their seedling pots. But it'll be so much better for them in the long run! :)

Keep all your seedlings moist for a solid 1-2 weeks, to let them establish. Then you can back off to a regular watering routine.

Next week, I'll give you a little update on how the garden is doing, plus some tips for hand-weeding! :)

Until then, Keep it green!