A very happy spinach plant, one of 8, in a raised planter

Today was my second in what will likely be a weekly Instagram Live Q and A session. At this point, the day and time are Fridays at 3 PM EST, and they run for about 45 minutes. Today’s involved a “show and tell” demo of my transplanting process, followed by a lightning round response to the many questions that flowed in. I love doing them and hope more and more people find them and join. Just go to Instagram and look for the live stream from me - @nctomatoman - on Fridays at 3 PM. I will also pop in live do some ad hoc live Instagrams when the mood hits or there is something particularly interesting I want to show and discuss.

The weather is becoming pretty spectacular, and our gardening activities are taking up big swaths of our days. We are flitting about doing a variety of things - weeding our flower beds, hunting dandelions in the lawn, relocating various flowers and shrubs and spending time improving the flower gardens.

My domain is the vegetable department, of course. I’ve now purchased and am in the process of preparing 20 straw bales, spread out in our back yard. 12 of the bales are in a double row and will contain indeterminate tomatoes. The rest of the bales are in two groups of four, and beans, squash and cucumbers will eventually reside in them (I will put a layer of planting mix on each group and direct seed the crops).

the bales are positioned and prepping is underway

I hope to tuck tomatoes, eggplants and peppers here and there throughout our yard, in edge flower beds, and in containers of various sizes. My Raleigh driveway garden was highly concentrated and quite limited in crop type. The garden here will range all over our yard and some crops I’ve not planted in years are in progress.

The new pea bed is doing great - the sugar snap and sweet peas (flowering types, not edible - climbing) are nearly ready to start twining up their supports. The rest of the bed is planted with the sweet shelling pea Wando, and they are up and growing as well. There is one area remaining with strings, and I will plant pole bean Fowler there tomorrow (the soil has warmed sufficiently for beans).

three types of peas are up - Sugar Snap, flowering Sweet Peas, and Wando bush pod sweet pea

The raised bed planter which contains the spinach plants (purchased at the nursery at the Asheville Farmers Market) also has a nice set of germinating rainbow mix carrots. The new raised bed contains all of the greens that we dug and took from Raleigh - a nice mixture of lettuces, bok choi, kales and collard and chard. We are already enjoying cooking with them and making salads.

Spinach and tiny just germinating carrots

A very special bush bean - Marbel - which I grew decades ago, but is now no longer listed in any seed catalog, has an interesting story. I reached out to Johnny’s Selected Seeds and the Seed Savers Exchange. Both had old samples, but were unsure if they would germinate. The great news is that the SSE sample germinated rapidly, and a few of the Johnny’s seeds are popping as well. I hope to grow as much of this bean as I can and save seeds and see if I can get a company interested in carrying it again.

As for tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, transplanting into 3.5 inch pots is underway. With the pandemic situation, it is unclear if or how I will distribute seedlings, but we shall see…I hope to be creative and find a way to sell some locally. The plants really look great - carrying out my annual processes in Hendersonville seem to be working just fine.