San Jose Plant (Tomato and Peppers) sale

San Jose Master Gardeners plant sale will be taking place on Saturday April 10 at Kelley Park, 1650 Senter Road, San Jose 95112
A good place to source your heirlooms. I have my tomatoes out already, so I dont know if I'll be going; parking looks as if it will be tight also, and most of it is paid parking, which will add to the cost. I notice that that Palo Alto have a similar sale the next week, I think, but if this is a leftovers sale, it may not have the same selection (but parking should be easier in terms of locating free parking).

In the picture above, you can see one of my test ideas for this year - milk bottles buried in the ground, filled with holes. The idea is that this will facilitate getting water down near the roots, without necessarily splashing so much water around on top. As you can see, its already a handy place to leave the hose while you switch the tap on or off, instead of just throwing it on the lawn, wasting more water.

Also, you can see how the tomatoes are doing - some growth since they were planted, not much, and there are flowers developing on all of them.

Mesclun growing nicely

As you can see from the picture above. We are starting to have some warm days now, although it can get quite cold suddenly in the afternoons. Still some hail around.
So far, none of the seed sown at the end of last month is up; nasturtium, borage, broad beans - so I dug up a spot and found one of the beans - its got the start of a root poking out of it, so I reburied it, and am hoping for the best. One worry though, I keep finding small white grubs in the soil that look like theyre just itching to get going eating the roots of my plants. Not quite sure what to do about that.

The slugs or something have continued on the broccoli and cress sown last month, grazing most of it now. I guess the iron isnt working as well as it might. I sprinkled some of last years barbecue ash around, and that seems to have slowed them a bit. Unfortunately, there is a limited supply.

Planted out some tomatoes, about 10 plants, a mixture of different types so I can compare them later. When they get growing, I'll take some cuttings and see if I can make more plants from those and how fast they bear fruit compared to the parents.

Some of the pots had 2 seedlings (of course, they were the ones I bought $9/5)
In order, left to right, the plants are:
Beefmaster, Beefmaster, Sweet100, Lemon Boy, Large Red Cherry, Large Red Cherry, Sunsugar red, Health kick, and Champion.
I planted these at the very front of the bed so as to catch as much sunlight as possible. Behind are the broad beans, and in the middle, I will plant the runner beans when the weather warms.