Consider taking them out, and back to HD. HD guarantees all plants!

Moni

Where were they in the store when you bought them? If they are inside under some type of cover, then I'd be safe and harden them for a couple of days minimum. If they were outside in difect sun at the store and had been for more than two days then they should have been OK.

Ezzirah,

I agree with Moni. They have a guarantee, they honor it, and I'd take them back and get replacements if they have them.

I never, ever assume plants in a garden center have been hardened off. My experience is that sometimes they have been hardened off properly and sometimes they haven't, and I am referring to all garden centers, big box stores and nurseries, as well as plants sold at Farmer's Markets.

My feeling is that for fall 2013, I'd try to buy transplants only at the Farmer's Market or direct from someone's farm like Sunrise Acres where the growers are likely to have hardened off the plants because it is their reputation that is on the line if the plants don't grow. With the big box stores, they have little control over the condition the plants are in when they arrive. Likely, they have no idea if the plants have been properly hardened off or not, so I wouldn't blame Home Depot. They get whatever plants arrive on the truck and, frankly, it is not their job to harden off the plants. It is their job to stock the plants on the shelves, water them enough to keep them healthy, and to shade them under the Garden Center shade cloth in order to keep them from roasting in hot summer/early autumn temperatures. They would lose their minds trying to harden off plants in a busy garden center with people coming and going, picking plants up, putting them down, etc. It would be a logistical nightmare.

The reason that purchased plants for fall planting are less likely to be hardened off properly is that they are being grown in summer's extreme heat and must be kept under pretty heavy shade cloth just to keep them alive while they're growing.

A few weeks ago I saw a new shipment of fall vegetable seedings, mostly herbs, a few fall tomato plants and pepper plants, and then a handful of eggplant, summer squash, zucchini and cucumber plants, at our local Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning. Likely they had arrived on a truck on Thursday or Friday. They were in a part of the garden center that had morning shade from shade cloth and afternoon sun because they were west of where the shade cloth ended, and our temps had been over 100 degrees that week. Were they in good shape? No, they already had little speckled spots of sunscald on the foliage, telling me they had not been properly hardened off by the grower. Anyone who bought those plants would have had to take them home and spend at least a week properly hardening them off before putting them in the ground, but I think the plants would have performed just fine after that.

At this time of year, I have to water my seedlings, whether they are in the ground or in flats, at least twice a day because their small root systems cannot take up enough moisture to get them through this windy heat and lack of moisture falling from the sky. If I miss a watering, they could die. That's just a fact of life at this time of year. With young, small plants there is a very small margin of error. Whether your plants died because they weren't hardened off, or because of transplant shock or too much hot wind while you were away all day is a moot point right now. Just take them back to Home Depot, get your replacements and harden off those plants before you transplant them.

To lessen the chance of transplant shock, first make sure the ground is prepared prior to planting. Loosen the soil, work in some compost, etc. Then water it well a day or two before you transplants. You want it moist at least 6" down beneath the surface of the soil. Water your seedlings well while they still are in their containers. If they ever get too dry even once while they are that small, it can hurt them enough that they never recover. Transplant them into the ground in late afternoon or early evening, taking care to not disturb their roots, and watering them in to settle the soil down around their roots. That way, they have the whole night to recover from being transplanted before they have to face a long hot day. If you are able, put an in or two of mulch on the ground around the transplants to help keep the soil more cool and moist, but leave it an inch or so back from the plants' main stems. Otherwise, bugs like pillbugs and sowbugs can hide in the mulch and munch on the young seedlings and you won't even know they are there until you discover your plants have been eaten. For the first couple of weeks, keep their soil constantly moist...not heavily wet, but just nice and moist. Doing all the above should prevent transplant shock assuming the plants are hardened off before planting.

It is very hard to get a fall garden going in the kind of conditions we've been having, but it can be done. The only way to learn how to do it, unfortunately, is by doing it....and experience is a cruel teacher sometimes. You'll likely lose some plants along the way because of the heat and low natural moisture, not to mention the wind.

Spring gardens are easier to start due to cooler, milder conditions most years and the real struggle is later on when they are larger and the weather is hot. The fall garden is the opposite--harder to start in brutal summer weather but easier to maintain as the weather cools off.

Normally, I don't shade new fall transplants that I have put in the ground, but if their foliage is curling up or wilting excessively by midday, I will stick my finger down into the ground to check the moisture. If the soil is moist, I don't water. If the soil is dry, I water it until it is moist again. I did shade the bush beans on the day last week we went to 108 because they were nice and moist but looking fried. I thought they were about to die. Normally, though, I avoid the shadecloth with summer transplants because daylength is shortening and they need all the sunlight they can get before we get too deeply into autumn.

Hang in there and do not become too discouraged. Anyone who can grow anything in the weather we've had this year deserves a medal.

Dawn

I just planted some tomatoes in small pots. My daughter and granddaughter plan on growing tomatoes in the house this winter (lots of luck). I did not want to discourage them, I will have other plants that will grow inside so their inside garden wont all fail.

I picked up 9 Chinese cabbage that I bought Fri. in Mena Ar. that are doing ok. I stopped in Ada Ok. yesterday to buy some broccoli plants, but decided the plants would be a bad investment. I transplanted some winter onions a while ago, but I dont think you can kill them.

I often use shade on new plants, and some times trim a little foliage if I have disturbed the roots a lot when I transplant in hot weather.

Larry

Larry, All those grasshoppers sure are going to be disappointed that you didn't bring home some broccoli plants for them to munch on. I have grown tomatoes inside the house in winter and also in the garage, but carried them outside on warm sunny days for as much sunlight as possible. It was a lot of work for tomatoes that barely tasted better than grocery store tomatoes. Still, I can understand why someone wants to do it.

Carol, Ditto on having issues planning for next year, or for any year when we have no clue what the weather will do. Unless we have a super-wet November and December, I'm planning for drought with a minimal grow list, but then with an 'expansion' list jotted down on a separate sheet of paper so I can add to the minimal list if rain starts falling and keeps falling.

If you'd asked me in January thru March of this year what kind of year I thought we'd have, I would have said "woo hoo, looks like a wet year" and started planting like mad. That is, in fact, what I did. The rain then stopped falling, and you know the rest.

Gardening shouldn't be as difficult here as it has been the last couple of years. If this is climate change, I do not like it at all. If it is just a temporary blip and more normal weather is going to return, that's a big relief. The problem is we have no idea if the recent drought years are an anomaly or the new normal.

Dawn

Dawn, the grasshoppers may get happy after all. Madge is going back to Mena Ar. tomorrow and I ask her to bring back some broccoli. The Co-op did not have the type of plants I wanted, and may not have any at all by tomorrow. I would like Packman, but have found none the places I have been. I have 4 different kind of broccoli seeds, but no Packman.

I bought 10 more sticks of 1/2"EMT today to build frames for row cover. I hope to grow some plants through the winter.

My daughter has an enclosed upstairs balcony that has 6 windows about the size of sliding glass doors. I think she would get enough light if it were not for the tint on the windows, only one way to find out if this project will work. There is no way we can drag the plants in and out.

Larry

Dawn & Moni - Thank you for that information, I do plan on digging them back up and taking them back. I was thinking it was "user error". LOL

Larry - I plan on doing the same. I have some very cold hardy plants started and I after the storm that is expected this weekend I will start hardening off the ones that have a longer days to maturity. But I have pvc pipe that I am going to make low tunnels out of, and frost blankets if I need an extra layer inside.

Larry,

We are having new hatches of grasshoppers here ever since the rain fell, so while the amount of big ones seems to be dropping, I'm seeing hordes of young, hungry hoppers. I am hoping the cold front and rain will make them unhappy. They prefer hot and dry to cool and wet, so let's hope for lots of cool and wet weather the next few days. Maybe then the hoppers will be too busy trying to stay out of the rain and they'll leave our garden plants alone.

When I grow tomatoes indoors, I use the ones that have plants that still really small. "Red Robin", for example, can be grown in 4 or 6" pots because it doesn't get very big, so lots of people grow it in small pots lined up inside a south-facing window or glass door. I've grown "Pixie Orange" and "Yellow Canary" in the same way. Sometimes I grow several of them in a window box because then I can carry it out into the sun easily, or I grow them in 1-gallon pots. Even though some folks grow them in smaller containers, I like for their roots to have a bit more room.

One small plant that produces pretty good-sized fruit is "Totem". It made fruit this year about the same size as "Early Girl" on a plant that was only about 18" tall. I grew it in my cattle trough planter that is only 10" deep along with many other kinds of hanging basket tomatoes.

In some past years I grew "New Big Dwarf" indoors in a 5-gallon container and it got 2 or 3' tall and I got tired of carrying it in and out.

Ezirah, Well, it is always easy for the gardener to blame himself or herself and, sometimes, it is our fault...but it isn't always our fault!

I did mean to add that the plants could have been hardened off properly before they left the wholesale grower, and then lost that hardened-off state if they were kept in too much shade between the time they left the grower and the time you planted them. For example, sometimes tomato plants arrive at stores in western North Texas near me in mid-February, and often the stores move them from the outdoor garden center to the indoors if the nights are still freezing cold and usually instead of moving them out every morning and in every evening, they just leave them inside. Once the plants have been inside a couple of days, they will sunburn easily and have to be hardened off again. I've had that happen here where I already had my plants very well hardened off and then had to move them back inside because of a prolonged cold spell, which meant I then had to harden then off all over again.

When I raise seedlings inside in summer for the fall garden, I only keep them inside until they sprout. The second I have green growth popping up out of the seed-starting mix, I move them outdoors to a table that gets morning sun, mid-day shade and late afternoon sun. That way, they have a great deal of sun exposure, but certainly not full sun because the hot August temps and sun would roast them since flats are not deep and cannot hold lots and lots of soil. As their transplanting date approaches, I move the table more and more out of the shade of the tree so that they are getting more and more sun before they go into the ground, but I only do that for 3 or 4 days since they are already half-hardened off during their growing life.

When I first started growing my own fall transplants over a decade ago, I grew them entirely indoors or in the shade, and had a heck of a time hardening them off. Plants that hae been too pampered in July and August do not like being moved out into the heat and sunlight. So, in this case, even though they need to be sprouted indoors because the indoor temperatures are in the right range for quick germination of the seeds, they also seem to do better if they have had to deal with the heat and sunlight from Day One once they've germinated. Raising fall transplants is harder in a lot of ways than raising transplants for the winter and spring garden.

Dawn

The whole hardening off process always gets me every year! If there was some way to avoid that, my gardening life would be so much more simple! LOL

I need to research that....

Ezzirah, I dont really "harden off" this time of year. I did get some purchased plants that looked pitiful and set them in the shade and watered them for about 3 days, so far they are doing well, they may die but it will be because they were almost dead when I got them. So far I have lost one of the 29 plants.

Larry

Ezzirah, you can avoid it! I had said almost the same thing last year...I was told to check out wintersowing. There is a GW forum about it and a website.

The idea is that you place seeds outside in a clear covered container and they germinate and grow when the temps are right for them. This opened up a whole new world for me, I can now grow all my own transplants (saves $) and I am not limited to what I can find in the garden centers. And it is a garden project you can do in the winter when the holidays are past.

Here is a link that might be useful: Wintersowing forum

Ezzirah,

You just have to master the hardening-off skill the way you master any other skill--through practice. Unless you are at home all day in the summer and can check on transplants in flats that are in full sun, it is hard to raise seedlings outdoors in summer, but when you can do that, you avoid the hardening off problem.

Even with plants I raise in the greenhouse, I have to be careful when I move them out of the greenhouse because the greenhouse is covered with 50% shade cloth to keep the temperature from going over 100 degrees every day in winter and even hotter in spring, summer and fall. That means they have to be hardened off some as well so they can go from 50% shade in the greenhouse to 100% sun outdoors.

With wintersowing, you can avoid the hardening off process but since you leave them alone and let them sprout on their own when the time/temperature is right for them, you will not necessarily have transplants that are ready to go into the ground when you want. They'll be growing more on their schedule than on yours. I don't find that to be an issue with flowers or herbs because most of them are not as time-oriented as veggies in terms of production. It can complicate warm-season vegetable gardening in our specific climate if you winter sow those seeds. In many cases we are in an almost-frantic race to 'beat the heat' by getting sizable transplants into the ground as early as the weather allows so that those specific vegetables produce a harvest before the fierce heat sets in. I sometimes winter sow flowers and herbs, but rarely veggies because of timing issues. I am not anti-winter-sowing at all, but just find that I get better results (i.e. an earlier harvest) with warm-season veggies if I raise them indoors under lights and transplant extra-early. I love winter-sowing for flowers and herbs that are not as time-oriented. After all, will it matter a lot to me if my nasturtiums, zinnias or salvias don't bloom until May or June instead of in March or April? No.

If the warm winter/hot spring of last year is an indication of what we can expect, more or less, in the future, it will be more important than ever to get plants in the ground early enough to beat the heat. We will have to start seeds unnaturally early and transplant sizable plants into the ground. Doing that sure paid off for me this year, and I'll work harder this coming winter to get plants into the ground larger and earlier. I am going to experiment with starting some tomato seeds indoors in late November this year so I can raise my own transplants to go into containers in February rather than buying those. That is more because I want to be able to have the varieties of my choice for early planting, not the varieties that Bonnie Plants chose to raise for early transplants.

Dawn

I have to say Dawn is absolutely right about the timing of wintersown veggies being later to get going. Everyone was talking about their harvests and I still had plants loaded with green tomatos! DH teased me, as I looked for ripe tomatos very impatiently.

I gave away my extra tomato plants and was told that mine were growing way faster than the store bought transplants. I know mine were never stressed. Also, once the harvest started coming, I quickly forgot that I had waited alittle longer! It was a great tomato year! I would have never got to try the great varieties that I grew from seed, because I havent been able to hardenoff well. (but I have a lot of good excuses!)

I intend to get a greenhouse in the next few years. Being able to properly hardenoff seedlings is a task I intend to master. I have killed many transplants,but I am learning, just 2 years ago I never even heard of "hardening off". LOL I am definately a rookie gardener. Being able to work with seeds opened up a whole new gardening world to me. I have to be careful....I think I might have a seed obsession!

Well, I think I have a good clue as to what happened. I walked out there today and I started to water the few remaining survivors of transplants there were and to pull up the ones that were just dead as a door nail. I watered the area first, because it needed it, but then when I pulled the plants up they pulled still like a plug from the pot, and bone dry! I mean dry as an old stick! I was shocked. I thought for sure they were getting enough water. I planted them in the ground the day after the last rain we had, and the ground itself was pretty moist at that time. But I guess all the subsequent waters never got down to the root. I would stand over them with my wand for quite a while and it still didn't soak all the way down to the roots. I do have about a half inch to an inch of pine bark mulch on top,that I put in place after I transplanted them, do you think the water never got down through the mulch?

I tried winter sowing one year. I got some good lettuce starts out it, got some snapdragons to come up, but that was it. nothing else would come up in time so I abandoned the process after that one year.

I will get hardening off right at some point. I think part of my problem is that I am impatient. I don't like to wait the whole two weeks. LOL

Here is an idea that just came to me. Take some PVC pipe, drill some holes down the pipe randomly, place the pipes down in ground between plants, then when I water, make sure I also get down in the pipes where the water would wick out of the pipes and around the roots....

How does that sound?

Well, without knowing exactly what your soil is like (something a person can only understand by dealing with the soil), it is hard to guess if the water soaked down into the ground or not. If it has a high clay content, it is likely the moisture did not make it down deeply enough into the soil to reach the root zone of the new transplants.

When I'm planting for fall in hot weather, there is a very low margin of error so I water with a soaker hose until the soil is good and moist, though not necessarily sopping wet, down about 6". The only way to know if it is moist 6" down is to stick a trowel into the soil, dig down 6" and see. While I'm watering the soil, I have the transplants soaking in a shallow pan of water. I want for their growing medium to be totally wet when I put them in the ground. Once the ground is wet and the transplants also are wet, I plant them, and then water them in briefly with a hand-held hose to pack the soil down well around the rootball of the transplants. After that, I check the soil daily--by sticking my fingers or a trowel down into it, and water before it dries out. In clay soil in the summer time, that may mean watering with a soaker hose one or twice a day. If the soil surface is so dry that the water starts running off instead of being absorbed into the soil, I will water for a little while, turn off the hose for a half hour so the water can soak in, then turn on the hose again, etc.

When the weather is hot, the moisture in the soil evaporates quickly. I never try to determine if the soil in the garden or even in container plantings is wet enough just by looking at it. I know from experience that the soil can look wet on the surface, and be bone dry a half-inch or inch beneath the surface, so I stick my fingers in the soil if it is a raised bed with pretty loose, fluffy, well-amended soil, or stick a trowel into the ground if it is more dense, more compacted clay. That is the only way to know for sure how wet it is and how deeply the moisture is penetrating.

Maybe the water never made it down through the mulch, or maybe it did make it down into the soil, but not deeply enough in the soil to help. Or, maybe it was fine and the ground was perfectly moist when you planted, but that moisture evaporated in a few hours. You want to have moisture well below the root zone of the new transplants all the time so that their roots can grown down into that moist soil to find the water. If the bottom of the plant roots are 2-3" below the soil surface and there is not adequate moisture there for them, they're going to die. If the water stays up near the soil surface and doesn't soak in, then the water won't even reach the roots and your transplants will die.

I have a large fall garden going and am having to water it every day, and sometimes twice a day, and I water deeply. If the new plantings were older, larger, and more deeply rooted I probably could water every other day, but small plants with small root systems require a lot of care at this time of year, especially when rainfall is minimal to non-existent. Right now it is 100 degrees at our house and the relative humidity is a piddly 15%. Guess how quickly moisture evaporates under these conditions? The answer, I guess, is that it evaporates too quickly, and also much more quickly than you'd think.

When I have mulch in a bed, I put either soaker hoses or drip irrigation lines underneath the mulch so I am watering the soil and not the mulch. The drawback to doing that is that if a soaker hose or dripline is clogged, you won't know it until a plant shows it obviously is not getting enough moisture. I watch my plants carefully for signs of moisture stress, and correct it as soon as I see it. Usually if a drip emitter is clogged, you'll notice the plant near it is stunted in its growth or its color is off or something that warns you the plant is suffering.

One reason I soak the plants before I put them into the ground is that the growing medium in which the transplants are grown is high in peat moss content. Peat moss, once it is dry, sheds water like a raincoat and is hard to re-wet. So, I start it out good and wet in the hopes it won't get so dry that it cannot absorb moisture. Also, if you ever happen to use plantable peat pots, the pots themselves, if dry, wick moisture away from the plant. When I buy plants in plantable peat pods, I soak the whole thing and get it good and wet and then peel away at least the bottom of the peat pots, and as much of the sides as I can get without destroying the soil structure. I put the peat pot on the compost pile and plant the plant.

All of these soil moisture issues are things you learn from experience, and it takes time. Anyone new to gardening will kill plants from time to time. It happens. It also happens to folks who are not new to gardening, by the way. Sometimes your soil can seem moist enough, but it just isn't.

This spring Tim was looking at one of the raised beds in the veggie garden. I had rototilled the compost and partially decomposed mulch into it the week before along with Tomato-Tone, and was preparing to transplant tomato plants into that bed. He kept saying how wonderful that soil was, how improved it was, how great it looked......it was like he just could not believe it. He said "it's so fluffy". It made me laugh because it was what we called concrete clay (for obvious reasons) when we first broke that ground in 1999. I stood and stared at him before I finally said "I hope it is well-improved by now. I've been improving it non-stop for 14 years now." That made him stop and think. Of course it looks good now, but it took a long time to get it that way, and if I stop adding new organic matter to it annually, it will revert back to horrid clay in just a couple of years. Heat eats compost, and we have extreme heat for weeks on end. If you have not added vast amounts of organic matter to your soil, your water just cannot penetrate it well enough to go deeply. It is a constant problem for me, and if you have clay soil, that may be what is going on with your little transplants. The moisture may have been around them, but couldn't and didn't quite make it to them.

Well, for the first year I planted I thought I had clay, but I bought a tiller and did this "jar test" I learned at osu and discovered I had sand! I had untilled clay! So it has been a whole new way of watering. When I water with my watering wand, I noticed it kinda sits on top then runs off. I compost like heck every year with compost/cow mature that I get in the store. I am thinking of adding grass clippings as well at the end of the year.

I need my compost bin back. When we were going to up a privacy fence I took it down.

I am definitely going to be keeping them transplants in water. I watered them real good before they went in the ground. I am guessing that was not enough. Last night I watered the ground read good, took my hand trowel, stirred the soil around, watered again, wash, rinse, repeat...LOL

I got another flat ready to go...so here's to hoping!

Ezzirah, If you dont have any post hole diggers you may want to take a look at some. I dont think I even own a trowel. I never have enough compost and when I am starting a new area, so I just amend the root zone of the plant. As time goes on I get more and more area amended.

My soil may be much like yours, the jar test says it is mostly silt. The soil test come back as clay or silty clay. Adding organic matter makes all the difference in the world. I am having even a harder time finding organic matter, it seems as though more people are trying to grow food now and almost nobody around here has good soil.

Larry

Ezzirah, I often recommend the jar soil test to new gardeners, using an article from Fine Gardening magazine that described it and soil improvement really well.

We have highly variable soil here, so I did a jar soil test about every 20 yards to figure out what sort of soil we had in each location before I began doing soil improvement and planting. Then I tried to amend the individual areas based on what I learned from the jar soil test.

You can have really hard compacted sand and if it is dry, it will seem like it is clay until you get it wet and break it up. As long as it remains compacted, water will roll right across the surface of it or will bead up on it like water beads on a tabletop.

We have one big pocket of sandy-silty soil that cuts across the property from south to north. Well, it isn't that big compared to the size of the property. At its widest point it might be 40 feet wide, and it runs about 130' long, but the part of it that runs inside the west garden fence is only about 8' wide. Everything I planted in the sandy area struggled in the summer until I'd been amending it for 6 or 8 years. I just couldn't put in more organic matter than the heat could decompose in a year. It still is not as good as the well-amended clay because it still drains too quickly, but it is a lot better than it used to be. Four o'clocks grow in the improved sand like mad so I've let them spread and naturalize themselves all around that sandy area outside the garden fence. Inside the garden fence I grow rhubarb, herbs, some flowers, beans and early tomatoes in various parts of the sandy western edge of the fenced veggie garden. I used to grow great sweet potatoes there, but the area has become too shady from the nearby pecan tree for them to grow there any longer. The rest of our sandy-silty soil is mostly in the woods and the creek bed, so I mostly garden in clay.

As much as I dislike clay, it is very rich and fertile. All you have to do is add organic matter to improve both its ability to drain and also to hold moisture properly, and it is great soil. With sandy soil, it is lower in fertility so you're not only having to add organic matter to help it hold water but you also have to fix its fertility issues. My friends here who garden in sandy soil have a lot of trouble with watering in summer because the water just runs down through the sand. Some of them also have root knot nematode issues in their sand. I've never had RKNs here, although of course they could pop up in the sandy area at any time. I'm just lucky that they haven't.

In a good year when the grass is growing, we mow once or twice a week, catch all the grass clippings in the mower's grasscatcher and add grass clippings, as mulch, to the garden beds every week all spring, summer and fall. Every bed won't get clippings every week because there's not enough grass clippings to cover the entire garden every week. We often overseed the lawn grass with winter rye grass and that enables me to mow in the winter and add more grass clippings on top of the beds all winter long. It doesn't matter how much I add---the soil always needs more, more, more.

Larry, Silt has been the hardest thing for me to learn to recognize. Our really silty area sits at the downhill side of my garden and prickly pear cactus love growing in it, but that makes some sense because the garden slopes and the silt is at the bottom of the slope. I've long wondered if the area where I garden now and the area where the sandy-silty soils are found on our property used to be a slough or creek bed that filled in because that's what it looks like--a sandy, silty river bed that cuts through otherwise impossible red clay. All the trees that existed on the upland part of our property when we bought it were found in 1 location----in that sandy-silty river of soil. Elsewhere in the upland clay we just had mixed prairie grasses and wildflowers. In the lowlying areas we have the thick woodland and what used to be a spring-fed swamp. The spring quit running during a previous drought year and I still call it the swamp, but it only is swampy after heavy rainfall.

The best solution when you cannot find organic matter to bring in is to use cover cropping to grow your own organic matter. I've been working with winter rye, spring clover and summer buckwheat to try to improve the area behind the barn where I'd love to put in a fenced area for more veggies or fruits. It is slow going, though. The clay there is just really, really dense and while the cover crops are improving it, it is a slower process than I thought it would be.

It is harder and harder to find organic matter here too. We are lucky to have friends who give us their old spoiled hay, but I doubt they'll have any for next year because I think they'll feed it all to their cattle this winter. I'm going to have to be really diligent about gathering autumn leaves this year.

My compost pile currently is about 30' long, 6-8' wide and 4' tall, but by the time all that stuff breaks down into usable compost, it won't cover 10% of my garden's raised beds. By the time it decomposes, the volume of it is reduced to about 1-3% of what I started with. That sort of drives me crazy.

Building good soil takes a really long time. We've been here 14 years and I'm just beginning to feel like the soil in some places is getting to be "good enough". In other places, it is nowhere near good enough and I don't know if it ever will be, but I keep plugging away.

Dawn

Larry, how do you use the post hole digger? I assume you would make a hole with it, and then put the compost down the hole??

That is a good idea!!!

At what point would you use a tiller?

Ezzirah, I use a tiller anyway to prep the soil and kill weeds. When I do a small area I just use hand tools, but I have an old back that wont let me do a large area. I just start a hole like I was going to build a fence. I set the top 2 or 3 inches to one side because I have shallow sorry soil, the next 2 to 4 inches I set to the other side because it will have much more clay in it. I use the top 2" to go back into the hole with the amendments. The size of the hole depends on what I am planting and how much amendments I have. My post hole diggers will make a 5 or 6 inch dia. hole. My theory is, give the crop the good soil and let the weeds fight over the sorry stuff.

My oldest growing area is 6 years old and I still plant my tomatoes and peppers this way. My Cole crops are planted in an amended area that is about 9" wide, the width of my Mantis tiller.

Larry

I LOVE that idea! I am so going to do that! That is the perfect solution! That way I get the plants in soil that I can water well enough with out all these poles I was going to plant with the plant. LOL

Thanks!

I am off to home depot as soon as I get a chance to get one!

This evening I started planting the vegetables that my husband just put out on our deck to harden (he plants them indoors in the basement). It was just last night when we were talking about whether we can start planting, and he said, "yes, we can actually start planting now". So, as soon as I got home, my mom told me about the plants outside that needed to be planted (she has no idea about hardening of seedlings before planting) and I totally forgot that my husband has been doing that for all the years he started our vegetables/flowers indoors). Was halfway into transplanting them in the vegetable garden outside (actually, already planted about 6 or 7 of the cherry tomatoes, and 6 cucumbers), when he came out and starting yelling and cursing me out! I suppose I deserved that! He told me to dig them all back up - I did. - yes, all of them. Now I worry that they might die and of course it will be all because of my stupid mistake!!!! Has anyone out there made such a mistake and how did your plants do? All the plants are now back in their little containers and sitting outside. (By the way, I think he just starting taking them out from our basement this very evening - probably not even a couple of hours before my snafoo!). HELP :(

I dont know anyone that starts seeds that does not start extras. Maybe you made a mistake, we all do, we just learn from them and go on. I just planted cucumber seeds day before yesterday, and I have tomato plants that I cant find a home for. I bet you have a neighbor that has too many plants and would love to give you some.

My wife is 75 years old and started her first tomato seeds this year. I did not tell her that she spent $20.00 on seed that I already had, I just gave my seeds away yesterday and helped her plant her very own row of tomato plants, and they look very nice.

Maggie, it would have worked to leave those plants in the ground and cover them with something, removing the cover for increasing amounts of time. Either way, they'll probably be fine. A couple years ago I planted about 50 tomato plants and... a few nights later we had a hard freeze coming. I went out by the light of a flashlight and dug them all back up, placing them, sloppily, into trays. They all survived, although I did mix some up when I replanted.

Anyway, it sounds like there was a communications snaffu. I wouldn't let The it bother you too much. As Larry alluded to, the best gardeners rejoice when others want to garden, and make the effort to try.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Thanks George. That was pretty much what I was told when I mentioned the "episode" to my friends and colleagues at work- could have just left them be and to cover them as well as not to worry as "it is no big deal". Am in Ohio and the weather is getting pretty hot. Also, my husband was whining about how I could be destroying his 2 or so months of hard work in pampering them to the state they were in ...I must admit the cucumbers were looking pretty healthy (some already "bear fruits"). He took them outside and brought them back in again last night. I just checked and a couple of the cucumbers are looking wimpy (leaves are kinda droopy), so, ya, I probably won't be hearing the last of the moanings and groanings about how I killed those plants if they do die:( Fortunately I didn't transplant his flowers - am sure the "wrath" would be in "full bloom":)