Our Menards finally got in a limited supply of 6-packs of tomato plants. The “generic” packs are $2.99 / pack. Variety selection was pretty good though, for a typical big box garden center and not a lot of plants: I picked up a pack of Mortgage Lifters (they are well “ahead” of mine started from seed), a pack of Lemon Boys (have never tried them before), and a pack of Better Boys. The latter 2 have multiple sections of multiple plants, so I’ll have to do some dividing - I usually have pretty good success with that. Outside of tomatoes there were a few six packs of peppers -mostly “hot” varieties of which I have plenty (Thai), some cabbage, and some various herbs, and that was about it. Lots of display space was still unoccupied.
I also “broke down” and nabbed one 4” pot of “Bonnie” orange bell (sweet) peppers that had a “2-fer” (2 plants in a pot), about 3/4” apart. Variety and supply of the 4” pots looked pretty good, but I think they were all $4.98 - too high for me! I messed up though and forgot to look for Japanese eggplants for my wife - I’d have bought a “2-fer” if they had any.
Luckily* for Menards, we got pretty close but didn’t “frost” last night. I’d covered a few plants I left outside, but, our Menards this time had a lot still out “unroofed”.
*”Luckily” I think — they are 20 minutes ESE of us and it was supposed to be cooler to the east. Usually WE would be ~2 degrees cooler.
My trial separating of the lettuce starts I mentioned previously went well: 2 plants are doing great, and one that looked a little dubious a day later is coming around. I’ll try separating the rest today if I can get to them. In all these cases of separating starter plants, it’s a bit tedious to not damage the roots too badly...
It looks like we have a couple weeks of pretty good weather coming up, so long as we don’t get destructive storms. In the case of the garden, hail is the big risk. We are drying out a bit, finally, but several roads in the area are closed due to high water - I had to detour last night coming home, because of that.
“In all these cases of separating starter plants, it’s a bit tedious to not damage the roots too badly...”
If the root ball is sopping wet, it makes it easier to separate the individual plants, but a very sharp knife on a dry root ball works well, too. ;)