It's Update Time

We had a killing frost last Saturday and most of my neighbors lost their garden plants.  (I never heard such creative cursing!)  But for some reason ours survived.  The lettuce, squash, green peas and volunteer sunflowers are all doing just fine. 

 Lettuce.  See the red stuff?  That's the row of lettuce.  The Romaine on the end didn't germinate.

Squash hills.  Dad calls 'em "nipples", the dirty old pervert!  We didn't get as good a germination rate as I'd hoped but with the screwy weather I'm not surprised.  We'll still have plenty of squash.

You can see what I mean by crappy soil.  It's very clay-heavy, so downpours form runnels and vanish into the perimeter of the garden plots.  Also, with another day or two of sunshine that whole area will look like a jigsaw puzzle from all of the cracks.

Volunteer sunflowers.  They're scattered throughout the south garden plot and hubby is very distressed.  He wants to transplant them into a row; I said "go ahead, just don't ask me to do it!".
 
The experiment with the oats as living trellis for the peas has paid off marvelously.  I showed this to Dad, who said, "Huh." (That's his standard response when he has been proven wrong about something.)  I could tell that he still thinks I'm nuts for planting "grass" in between the rows of veggies, but he was somewhat impressed with this:

See how the pea tendrils have grasped the blade of oat?  OK, it's not the best pic but trust me - the peas have strangleholds on the oats.  Can you say, "Living trellis AND green manure?  Yeah, baby!"

We're still transplanting seedlings from the flats into peat pots.  Jeff does the actual transplanting; I'm afraid my brown thumb will kill the poor darlings.  We've got about 70 eggplant seedlings and 50  tomatoes left to go.  Crossing my fingers I'll have enough shelf space under the lights for them.  Otherwise the larger tomatoes will have to be hardened off pretty quick.  (It looks like we've finally had our last frost - 6 weeks after the USDA's last frost date for our region!)

More transplants will be needed because of the seeds I just started yesterday:  Thai peppers, orange bell peppers, red/green bells, yellow bells, and poblanos. Diamond eggplant. Oh, and the blue cherry tomatoes!  I can't wait to see those fruits and I'm betting they'll sell like hotcakes.  The yellow cherry tomato seed hasn't arrived and I'm somewhat pissed at Baker Creek.  Usually they're fast, but I guess I should cut them some slack since their fair is going on this week.

There's a bit of weeding to do, and as you can see there's MOWING (thanks to all the rain) so I'm off to mow and to tromp around in mud up to my ankles. Time to paint my toenails so the dirt doesn't show!