Well, as Tanny reported yesterday we planted all our seedlings. After work tonight we checked their progress and, to our great dismay, the tomatoes are all limp and lifeless!! It appears we have not hardened our plants properly and they got sunburned under today’s blazing sun.

Hopefully they will recover - we’ve been dreaming of a tomato bounty for weeks.

Josh and I have just spent a lovely and productive Victoria Day weekend planting our newly expanded vegetable garden.  We’ve converted two of our flower beds to accommodate our 25 strawberry plants and 7 tomato plants, amongst other newcomers.  I’m very excited for our edible garden this year.  We actually started our seeds early enough this year and our tomato plants are over a foot tall already!  We also have a variety of herbs this year and our watermelon seedling is still alive!

Here’s a list of what’s in our garden this year:

• tomatoes: black cherry, blanche beaute, new: yellow cherry, beefsteak and ruffled red
• herbs: sweet basil, thyme, chives, cilantro and parsley
• potatoes
• garlic: five different varieties (one did not survive the fridge)
• sweet red pepper
• wax beans
• sugar snap peas
• carrots: scarlet nantes and Chanteny
• veestar strawberries
• blueberries: northland and northcountry
• raspberries

not planted yet: golden midget watermelon

Our local CSA share starts up again in 3 weeks.  Soon, we’ll be back to eating all local, all the time.

With the exception of the watermelon, my seedlings are doing quite well.  Most have at least one set of “true” leaves.  The McMullen tomatoes are over 3 inches tall! I’m supposed to pinch back the weaker seedling in each pot, but I can’t bring myself to do it just yet. One more week.

This weekend (Victoria Day Weekend) marks the beginning of the growing season for us in the Toronto area.  I didn’t start my seedling early enough to transplant this weekend, but I will be sowing some carrots, parsnips and peas directly in the garden.

Thanks to the milder weather and rain this week, most of the snow has melted in our backyard.  Some of the tulips and daffodils are coming up, actually.  Spring is finally here!  That had caused some momentary panic - we still haven’t planted our seeds yet.  It’s been three weeks since we bought our seeds from Seedy Saturday, and they’re still sitting in the den.  We don’t even have the dirt to plant them in.  All we’ve got are seeds and some plastic milk bags (I read somewhere that milk bags are good for starting tomato seedlings because you can roll them up to add more dirt as the seedling grows.)  We plan to go to a local garden centre to get supplies and get those seed planted this weekend.  Only six more weeks until the “official” gardening weekend in southern Ontario - Victoria Day long weekend.