At the same time I demolished the mini-greenhouse in the shoebox, I decided to plant a couple more things. The aforementioned zucchini was one, and some American jack-o-lantern pumpkins was the other.
Well. Here we are twelve days later, and here's the report. By far the most progress was from the pumpkins! There was growth in all six of the egg cups, and some had two sprouts (the packet said to plant 2-3 seeds together, so I did). All the pumpkin sprouts are at least 2 inches tall. They won't be ready by the 31st of course, but the plan is to harvest the seeds from the biggest pumpkin and plant those in May, and then I might sell a few when they're mature. We'll see what happens.
The next best effort was from the watermelon seedlings, which also had growth in all six cups. Those are only about 3/4 inch tall, but they're all strong.
The rockmelon (canteloupe) seedlings look good too. There were only four cups (I previously separated the two strongest ones, but they died) but they all sprouted.
The zucchini...I've already told you about the zucchini. Which leaves us with the capsicum (red pepper). Six cups, all six cups had at least two seeds planted. And the result is...one seedling. ONE! And that one only just came out in the last couple days. So I'm leaving those in the bag for a bit longer. Given the instructions say to grow them in pots, then transplant to bigger pots, then maybe transplant them into the ground, that kinda tells me they might be hard to grow. So we'll just see what happens, right?
And the rest of the garden is looking pretty good too. Remember how I said Caleb was helping me weed my garden - only he was pulling out actual plants? Well, the fact that we went away for three days last weekend means they had a chance to grow undisturbed for a while - even though it was hot & didn't rain the whole weekend. So they're looking very strong now.
And the nectarine tree. We're not sure anymore if it's a nectarine, or if it's a plum. The fruit is pretty dark, and I've seen pictures of both types of trees, and at this point, the nectarine tree is the one our tree looks more like. But it's too soon to tell.
And finally, my great find this week. I walked up to John Street on Wednesday and saw a garage sale sign pointing down an alley. I'd seen the sign before, but the one time I went down the alley, I couldn't find anything resembling a garage sale. But this time there were two other women ahead of me who started walking down that way, so I thought, well, why not? And I found this shop space with "for rent" signs in the windows, and the door was open, and the place was full of STUFF. So I walked around. I had Caleb in the pram so I had to be careful I didn't bump into anything. And as I got toward the back of the shop, I thought, hey, I should look for a wheelbarrow, and whaddya know, there was a wheelbarrow. It was sitting there with a bunch of other stuff in it. So I went to ask how much (because nothing was labeled with a price - that seems to be how it goes at Adelaide garage sales), and the man said $15 plus delivery of $5. Well. $20 for a used wheelbarrow, even if it had a bad wheel or something, is nothing to sneeze at. The cheapest new one at Bunnings is around $40. I paid for it and he dropped it off at almost exactly the time I said I'd be home (I'd actually been home for about an hour by then). It does have a small puncture hole, and might have a small crack, but it works. It's one of the things that's been on our list of things to get since we moved into this house almost two years ago.
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