there are so many other things... and they will have to wait.

I have reached a curious point in my gardening escapades where I have a little extra soil but nothing ready for stage 1 transplanting (demonstrated to the right). I have transplants ready for stage 2 transplanting (typically the final transplant), but I lack both the necessary volume of soil and extra containers into which to transplant things. I planted a variety of seeds what must have been two weeks ago, but nothing has come up yet, despite my best efforts to keep the seeds moist at all times. I'm sure that I'm just trying to rush germination, but something really should have come up by now. Once upon a time, they were little seedlings (mind you, this photo is from late February/early March), so it's sometimes hard for me to believe that the hulking behemoths that I currently have came from these tiny things.

My Russian heirloom tomato plant has a couple more tomatoes on it, and the ones already there are getting larger. This guy is a Black Plum, and he now has a grand total of six tomatoes on him, including one not pictured here (the photo is over a week old) which is shaped just like a little pear. It's kind of obnoxiously cute. Around the base of the plant, there are marigolds, which are the little bits of orange in the photo.

I just finished three stage two transplants last week-- two tomato plants, which are all of a mystery variety, although I hope that at least one is my treasured Genovese tomato, and the other that I transplanted a week ago is now overcoming its sunburn.

For the first time since all this tomato nonsense began, my tomato plants have gotten to the point where some need to be restrained, and I have long sticks holding them up (or down, as the case may be).

The potato leaf tomatoes seem to be coming in fine, despite my previous concerns about blight and countless other potential disasters. I'm starting to accept that perhaps they just look funny because that's how they are, but it's taken at least four months for this decision to be reached. Unlike the plum tomatoes, these Hillbilly Tomatoes, which I chose largely for the name and only partly for the colour, are short and round when they first come in, and I now have upwards of ten between my two plants. The one featured to the right looks particularly odd because it is growing upside-down for some reason completely unbeknownst to science itself.

In the past week, the garden has undergone a minor revolution: basil has been dug up and transplanted near new tomatoes, a squash plant has a much larger home of its own because it needs the space for all the flowers coming in, and tomato plants and a pepper plant have been moved to much larger containers so that they're able to start producing soon. My old piano bench, which previously held all of my smaller transplants, is now only 2/3 full, and before long, it will hold a variety of lettuces. Back then, however, one section of it looked a little something like this: