Staking Tomatoes, Sprouting and Thinning Plants

Another busy week now that garden season is in full swing with transplanting, planting seeds, weeding, feeding, mulching and now staking my tomatoes.  I like to stake my tomatoes as soon as possible; preferably right when I transplant them to the garden.

Although I didn’t stake them right when I transplanted them I did in fact place them in shortly after they were added into the garden soil.  I like to put the stakes as close to the plant as possible so that it will make it easier to tie them to the stakes.

With only about 14 plants total I didn’t have to do that much staking.  I had a real low sprouting rate with my tomato seeds this year.  Hopefully I will be able to do very well despite the few plants that I have.  Better care will have to be exercised this season for a bountiful harvest.

Right now I have not tied them to the stakes and will do so once they start producing tomatoes.

Many of my seeds that I have planted have begun to sprout thanks to the rain that we got this past Sunday.  After the rain my plants received some much needed sun and that is exactly what they needed to start sprouting.

Today I also began thinning out most of my plants that were grown from seeds.  Once most of the seeds sprout I then begin to thin them out and make certain that I don’t wait too long and it becomes more difficult to thin them.

I first started with my corn plants.

Here are my corn plants right after thinning them.

I then worked on my cucumber plants since pretty much most of the seeds that were planted have sprouted.  As you can see many of them are close together and that is why I must thin them out to give them some room.  I try to only keep the best ones if possible.

Once I thinned out my cucumbers this is what they look like right now.

Lastly I worked with my melon plants.  The seeds that I planted here were only cantaloupe and honeydew.  I have found that these plants do not need that much room and that is why I planted them instead of watermelon.  I have three good watermelon plants and that is plenty for the summer.

I only had one honeydew plant that survived and none of my cantaloupe.  That is why I decided on growing an extra row of cantaloupe and honeydew melons.  I planted plenty of seeds to make sure that I got a few melon plants for the summer.

Now once I went through them all it become much more spacious for them.  I tried to space them at least one foot apart to give them some room for when they eventually begin to vine.

I still have beans, sunflowers, and carrots that I will have to eventually thin out.  Right now my carrots are too small to thin out and I usually try to do them after a few weeks and they are easily noticeable.  My beans I will do very soon and probably by this weekend I should finish it.  My sunflowers I can do at anytime because I am only using them for attracting bees.

On a side not I weeded my onions in totes recently and added some mulch to keep the weeds down and hold moisture for them.

Take a look at what they looked like before weeding them.

Now look at them after weeding them.

To prevent that from happening again I made sure to add mulch to block out the weeds.