My Garden Grow Journal

The garden looks great, brother!
I'm growing some peppers as well and it seems to me like they're growing very slowly. I think nighttime temperatures here are still too low for the peppers to flourish,but, that is literally just a guess.
I would also suggest some mulch. I tried cocoa bean shells but they get moldy and stick together, I don't really like those. I'm using some straw now and it seems to be doing alright but I read it takes a very long time to break down. I watched a film today called Back To Eden and the man in that film uses a variety of wood chips and his garden is almost perfect, in my opinion. I would like to try wood chips next, but avoiding cedar for it too takes a while to decompose.
I hope that helps, bless!

 

 
Hey guys! Your garden looks great! So you have two beds, 1 bed with tomatoes and one with peppers, correct? The tomatoes looks great and the spacing is very good also. Why are you going to veg your tomatoes? I honestly have never heard of it. But seriously, I want to know how you do it. The marigolds will keep certain animals away to an extent. I would invest in come cheap fencing and posts to go around your beds. I'm in south western Ohio and have all the woodland creatures in my backyard. I have a 3 foot fence around my raised bed and it does perfect. I would look into doing that if you're having pest problems.
 
If your looking for what your problem could be with your peppers it could be a number of things. You could be watering them too much?  Also they look very young, did you grow them from seed or did you pick them up at a local nursery/Lowe's/Home Depot? If you did pick them up from the nursery then transplanting them incorrectly or leaving them un planted for a period of time after the purchase could cause problems. I'm not sure that this happened I'm just running shit through my head. There also could be problems with the soil. Is it just tilled ground or topsoil....what did you use?

 

 
Yes, plants from seed can be stressed by too much sunlight. That could be it, keep an eye on them. Good luck!

 

 
11 hours of direct sunlight is too much for young plants use to being inside.

 

got any "weeds" trying to grow near the peppers?
 
"weeds" make excellent, free shade that not only loosens subsoil but adds organic matter to the soil when you are done using it and slows evaporation and reduces the need to water
 
in the spring i spread my seed and let everything come up, weeds and all, and after my intended crops come up and start to get about 4 inches or so (this is instruction for small plots as you seem to have, the technique is a bit different for larger areas) then i start pulling the TOPS of the weeds off and laying them down as a mulch (i.e. just droping them where they grew or where i have excess bare soil and poor germination) and thereby make the weeds a sort of living mulch/groundcover with the intended crop growing taller than the "weeds" do
 
i also tend to get some free edibles every year as well, this year it looks like ill get lots of mallow and lambsquarter with a bit of pigweed, all three are edible but i really love lambsquarter and mallow and snack on them whenever i get the chance
 
also in my personal experience (though not everyones im sure), purchased "topsoil" as they call it, tends to harden up at the surface, dry out fast and reflect a lot of heat and sun back to the plants growing in it, giving poor germination and survival rates, i recommend simply mulching with straw or dead leaves/weeds to remedy this, after there is some mulch on it, purchased topsoil will make some decent soil to work with from my experience

 

sounds great to me
 
loosely with the grass, it tends to clump up and form anarobic mats that prevent water or oxygen from getting to the soil, i find it helps to scatter gregariously or simply mix with twigs or something else that helps keep it loose and airy