A few new plants & a baby cucumber

After some investigation online, I think that I planted my lettuce much too late for it to grow well. I was hopeful because Bibb lettuce is said to be heat-tolerant, but this morning my little lettuce plants barely had their first sets of true leaves, and one of the four had already been eaten to the ground by some kind of critter - and it's already mid-June!

I also had one bell pepper in the garden that simply had not grown at all since I transplanted it. It was a California Wonder that I grew from seed, and when I planted it it was the same size as the others, but today it was dwarfed by the others and still had just a few leaves.

I hardly wanted to waste 2 precious square feet of my garden on an undersized pepper plant and a crop of lettuce that was certain to bolt! So off I went to the nursery to pick up two new plants.

I ended up choosing an Ichiban Eggplant and a Cayenne Pepper plant. Ichiban was recommended in my container gardening book, "The Bountiful Container", since it grows well in small spaces, so I thought I'd put that one in the square foot where the lettuce used to be. I also uprooted the underperforming bell pepper and replaced it with the Cayenne Pepper transplant from the nursery, which was already much bigger than my bell pepper. I debated what to do with the bell pepper I had pulled up, and I couldn't bring myself to throw the little guy in the woods. I put him in a medium sized pot, and I hope he takes advantage of his second chance!

Here's my garden today, June 20th, with the new plants in place:





I was also really excited to see my first baby cucumber growing:



I must admit, I did not master the art of cucumber growing this year. I started cucumbers indoors when I started my tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables. Big mistake! Cucumbers grow so, so fast and before I knew it I was repotting them in 6-inch pots. Here's a picture of the cucumber plants on April 25th, 22 days after starting them from seed:



... and then just a month later, on May 30th, they looked like this:



They were all over the place! There was no way to harden them off, because they were sprawled out everywhere and their little tendrils had lassoed anything they could find: the windowpanes, each other, the wire shelving I had set them on ... since they could not be moved, I was forced to leave them indoors. I started over by direct-seeding new plants in the raised bed in the beginning of June, and those plants are doing great. But I left my original cukes in their pots indoors just to see what would happen. I have to pollinate by hand, but it looks like they are growing cucumbers despite the low sunlight on the windowsill. When my outdoors cukes start producing, these guys have GOT to go, but for now I'll let them try their best. Lesson learned though: do NOT start cucumbers in the beginning of April with the tomatoes. I should have started at most 2 weeks before planting outside.

My Bell Boy has begun flowering, happily. The transplants from the nursery are apparently somewhat ahead of my starts, so I'm pretty happy about that and I hope I'll have fruit to pick next month :)