Garlic, Lots of Irises & Tomato Buds

First off, I finally received the last 2 items from my Jung order. The St. Croix Grape plant looks great, but the California White Garlic was ridiculously moldy. =( I called Jung immediately after I saw this. The lady was like, "Well, sometimes there's surface mold on the garlic. Is it squishy?" I told her that yes, it is squishy & that the mold runs halfway through the cloves. Not too big of a deal, as I just received about 30 garlic starts (4 different kinds) in the mail this weekend that are perfectly healthy (no mold). So, i'll plant some of that instead.

Some of you may have heard of my great Craigslist find. I bought bag of easily 40+ heirloom Iris starts from a nice lady in Brentwood for only $5! I potted up as many as I had pots for this weekend. I should have several to give away at the MTPS, and also several for my 2010 Flower Garden. Yay! =) I also gave about 10 to my neighbor and still have 10 or so left I didn't have pots for. I'll have to figure something out soon before they go bad/die/rot. I've been meaning to call this guy who owns a nursery in Murfreesboro. He's going to sell me 1 gallon nursery pots for 5 cents & 5 gallon ones for 40 cents. Great deal.

Tomato Buds Are Here! =)
I have 2-3 sets of tomato buds growing now on the 7 plants I have left from the seeds I started January 23rd. It's gonna be great to about have little tomatoes growing right when I put the plants outside in their final homes mid to late April. Below are 2 pics of my indoor setup (mostly tomato plants with some peppers in the 72 cell flat & some Stevia in the 6 cell coir flat) along with about the best pic I could get of one of the bud sets.





You can kind of see the bud set growing off the main stem about in the middle of this picture. =)





An Update on the rest of Steve's Garden: My garlic chives continue to grow very well. The Triple Crown blackerry plant has a ton of little 1 cm or so long leaf buds/starts on it, along with a new cane stub growing. The Wineberry Raspberry plant leaf stubs/starts are growing excellent! They are all over an inch long now & you can see the little leaves growing out now. Both my strawberry bed & container strawberry plants continue to grow, just new leaf sets for now. I have about a 40% germination rate so far on the flowers I started from seed about 6 days ago. =) They are outside in my tall shelf greenhouse & seem to be doing fine with the bit colder temperatures. I have yet to have my Canna's, Sunflowers, Nasturtiums or any other buds/seeds planted straight into beds/pots pop through yet though. I'm hoping I'll start to see some this week.