They finally dried out!

After about 10 days or so of not watering my plants, the tomatoes finally dried out. I waited a bit longer than I wanted to and some did start to wilt. I know that's frowned upon by some, but I figured I need to experience truly dry plants to make sure I understand when I need to water them. The peppers and pomegranates are still pretty moist, I'm expecting the peppers to need watering in another day or so. Back to watering, I did get a meter last weekend to test the amount of light, wetness and pH balance of the soil. best 8 bucks I could have spent. I took some wetness readings from the plants and can test the next couple of weeks until I finally have a grasp of when to water without using the crutch. Tomatoes are looking perking now, but I did find a beetle near one of my tomato plants. I don't think he was on the plant per se, and there was no sign of damage. Later this evening I'll be going out and inspecting to see if any critters decide to sneak in after sundown.

Temperature <= 32 degrees, Day #2

Yeah, I know, "boo hoo, Florida's having it's 3rd cold night this winter, big whoop". It is what it is, I suppose. The thermometer is set to dip into the 20s tonight, it was 32 degrees when I woke up at 8am this morning, not quite sure if it went any lower than that. The sun flowers are covered with cups again, I'm hoping this will be out last cold night for the winter. Predictions have us back into the 40s over night by Friday evening. Guess that's why I love Florida so much, we get just enough cold weather to remember that it's there, but it barely lasts a day or so, and then we're back to normal.

The couple of cold nights forced me to bring all my plants inside to stay warm. This ended up being more of a blessing than anything else. Remember when I talked about how we got 1.5 inches of rain in a day last week or so? Well everyone's finally drying out and looking much much better. My only fear now is that the damage is already done, and the roots have rot. From my research, that's probably not the case as the plants have perked up considerably since yesterday when a few of them appeared droopy. All of my seed trays are doing well though, and funny enough are suffering the opposite effect from the extra heat. They were drying out in a bad way, and a few of them ended up drying up and dying. This morning I was proactive and added some water to the bottom of the trays. This seemed to work nicely as when I came home from work, most of the water had either evaporated or absorbed into the peat pots.

Cold Chillin' in Central Florida

Freeze warnings in effect for the area tonight. It's 43 degrees currently. Most of my plants are potted and were pulled in last night due to previous frost warnings. Unfortunately, I left a tray of seedings (assorted hot peppers and grape tomatoes) too close to a heat vent. A few weeks back that wouldn't have been an issue, but now with the new A/C they were dried out a bit. I watered them and am hoping for the best. Yesterday we suffered another loss with one of the recently transplanted roma tomato plants. Seems the Florida wind decided to help with the gardening and the stem gave. My wife suggested that I just put some supports under it before giving up on it. We shall see. Currently in the ground I have 8 dwarf sun flowers which I've covered with plastic cups. No big deal if we lose them as they are quick to grow, and we have 2 more varieties already going in the house. I'm hoping this is going to be the last frost of the year, but you never know (the Tampa average last frost is around February 25th).