Editor’s Note:  I hope all my readers will welcome my brother to the blogosphere!  He is going to blog the Minnesota half of the Garden Notes, and this will be a great way for both of us to work together to learn the art of vegetable raising.  So without further ado, here is my little brother. ~Erika

Greetings!  This is Ben, aka the Tomato Bug, aka Erika’s little brother.   I was hoping to get a post in before I went out of town this last week, but I just plum ran out of time.  Now that I am back in town I will see if I can get some updates on here and keep track of how things are growing.  Things are a little crazy in the basement as we are trying to get a lot of painting done before family comes to visit next week, so pictures will have to wait for a future update.

Peppers – I am a little disappointed this year in my pepper growing skills.  This is my first year growing anything from seed, so this is really a learning experience for me.   I originally planted all of my pepper seeds on March 15th (aside from a Chinense variety that I started on the 8th).  They started out doing great, and I had 12 sprouts a week later.  This is where things started to go south.  I did two things that I should not have done.

1 – I used both a heating pad and a humidity dome with  a light  to get things going, so I was really doing a good job of cooking those peppers.

2 – I did not give them enough water to grow or stay alive.

I started round two of my peppers two weeks ago today (much later than I would have preferred).   As of today this is what is coming up:

2 Sweet Chocolate

2 Purple Jalapeno

3 Grande Jalapeno

2 Serrano

1 Big Jim

1 Heritage Big Jim

1 Jalmundo

2 Fresno

I am still hopeful that more will come up, but we might be supplementing our home grown peppers with some nursery bought pepper plants.

Tomatoes – I couldn’t be happier with how the tomatoes are coming up right now.  I learned a lot already from the original pepper failure, so the tomatoes already had a leg up.  All of my varieties except one have at least sprouted some, and the one that hasn’t sprouted was a freebie from someone over at Tomato Garden.  Here is what has come up so far:

8 Vorlons

7 Carbons

6 Black Krim

3 Dr Wyche

11 Golden Sunray

6 Pink Ponderosa

6 Black Cherry

9 Sungold

4 Purple Russian

2 Cowlick Brandywine

3 Pantano Romanesco

3 Cour Di Bue (these ones got a late start, as when I opened the seed packet nothing was in there, had to wait on a replacement from Baker Creek)

The tomatoes are doing great, and I can’t wait to sink my teeth into that first ripe tomato of the year.   If you look at the numbers, that is a lot of tomatoes, and I am hoping a few more come up yet.  Erika and I are doing a tomato swap this year (and hopefully all years to come).  I am responsible for Purple, Red, and Orange varieties of tomatoes, and she is starting the Green, Pink, and Yellow tomatoes.  I also have a few other people I was hoping to gift with tomato and pepper plants, but it doesn’t look like I will have a whole lot of mature pepper plants to hand around.

Well, I suppose that is it for now.  I will try and keep some updates coming, and in the future will also get some pics of my setup and plants.    Oh, I also started some Basil last Saturday, and currently have 4 sweet basil sprouts and 7 genovese basil sprouts poking up.  I am concluding with a “hats off” to my wife, who watered everything quite well while I was out of town.  I came back to more sprouts then when I left, so she is doing something right.

The Tomato Bug