The tomatoes I trasfered into the ground - well, some were lost to heat. But now I seem to be about to lose some to hammering rain? A few look limp and unhappy after the sky bucketed down and washed away some of the top soil around their roots.

Meanwhile I'll see how the potato buckets go - I've had to tip over some of the more shallow buckets to drain, then just left them that way with more rain on the way. The ones with large plants I've left for now (will probably tip to drain tomorrow) as the plants tend to drink up some of the water.

Anyway, with the rains coming this is a big test for the bucket system!

Potato buckets are going fairly okay. Harvested from a couple more and as usual the potatoes cluster around one layer. With a couple of buckets where I planted the potato low, it's grown higher than the bucket now, so I've topped it up with soil. Though leaves half covered with soil died off, the plant seems to be keeping on. So hopefully it grows potatoes at a number of levels, ala the idea behind hilling potatoes when grown the traditional way in the ground.

Also with the summer sun here burning the lawn down, I've taken advantage of where I tore out some weeds to dig eight small holes, then transfered some tomato plants into them that I had been growing in the greenhouse. Often when I transfer, I don't make the hole deep enough and the tomato plant sits on a mound, both not having it's roots very deep and also the mound washes away with watering, exposing it's roots. This time I am avoiding that and hoping to take advantage of what is a very dry lawn at the moment.

Water Melon and Tomatoes

Back onto it! Currently I have a medium size plastic greenhouse, bought at the Reject shop for around $25. This is really handy for getting plants up from the seedling level without snails eating them when they are young and vulnerable and also the trays you use in it wont have encroaching weeds building up in them.

One of the more recent experiments is growing watermelon plants from bought seeds. The germination rate wasn't good - only two plants out of about ten seeds tried. However, you get quite a few seeds in a packet and if you keep the seeds from any melons grown (which you will if you want to be good with money!)

Also took dried tomato seeds from paper sheets and planted them in a tray inside the green house. These seeds were taken simply from when you cut up a tomato on the chopping block and seeds seep out onto the block. Use a knife to lift them and place onto paper, then leave the paper to dry. Latter after they are nicely dry, scrape off with your finger nail and put into the soil.

At the moment I put in a small piece of cardboard next to each seed, so as to get an impression of where to look and the sucess rate for every single seed I've put in! Also I'm experimenting with this tray, to simply put the seed on the surface and let gentle watering with a watering can do the work of pressing it to soil. If you can skip sticking each below the soil, why not? :)

I actually did a smaller tray and was so heartened by how many cardboard markers had a tomato plant sprouting up (from seeds that I had dried months ago) that I set up a bigger tray. Though according to a chart I have, for this location planting tomatoes ends at the end of december. Should be able to set up a patch easily before then, though!