Garden update

Today I got my rain gutter containers planted.  Hopefully we won't have any more freezes until late in the fall.

I have two snacking peppers, and six tomato plants.  The tomatoes are:  Better Bush, Champion, Parks Whopper, Super Fantastic, Mountain Pride, and Solar Fire.  There's one each of the tomatoes and two planters of peppers, for a total of 8 on the gutter.  There's room for nine, but I wanted to leave a little more room for the indeterminate tomatoes on the east end so I left one bucket off and spread three buckets out a little.  You can see the empty 9th bucket sitting forlornly on the ground at the end of the row.

Remember this picture?

It's my strawberry square (4x4 ft) after the winter ended a few weeks ago.  Below is how it looks now.

The strawberries are taking off!  In fact, a lot of my garden is doing pretty well.  I have had a horrible time with seeds, but most of the seedlings I bought in the store are thriving.  The exceptions are a couple of pepper plants that I planted in a bubble SIP.  I added some fertilizer to the mix and then planted them, then read the instructions on the fertilizer.  It called for 1/2 cup per 5 gallons of mix, and I added 1 1/2 cup.  They aren't looking too good right now.  I don't expect them to make it but maybe they'll pull through.

I have two more tomatoes planted, one each in last year's global buckets.  One bucket has a Yellow Pear and the other has a Lemon Boy.

I planted a dwarf Japanese Maple in a small container this week also.  If it does well it will grow to 6 ft tall and 8 ft wide.  When it starts getting big I will get a bigger container, but it says on the tag that it is slow growing.   I found a slideshow of someone's yard that had several Japanese Maple varieties growing and it looked beautiful.  I've wanted one ever since, so now I have one.  It says it likes direct sun and partial shade, so I might move it to a spot that gets some afternoon shade.

I've got more pictures but didn't want to make this post too long.  Besides, now I have fodder for more posts for a few days.