I am so excited about our seedlings this year.  Last year's tomato plants were tall and spindly and didn't even last a day after I transplanted them outside into the garden.  Using techniques I've learned through The Vegetable Gardener's Bible our tomato seedlings are thriving.  They look so happy in their little containers, I can barely contain my excitement (please pardon the pun)!  Soon we'll be needing to move them into yet another container so they can have more room to spread out.

Transplanting left and right normally isn't my thing.  I know its important to have plants in big enough containers, but we rarely have enough pots to go around.  This year we're reducing the amount of juice and milk containers we send to the recycling center by using those as our planters.  We just cut the tapered tops off, leaving a decent-size vessel that we can fit either three seedlings initially, or one for the second transplanting.

The tomatos we're growing currently are "paste tomatoes"- so they boil down into sauces and pastes much quicker than other tomatoes that have a lot more liquid in them.  We're planning on growing regular tomatoes as well, so we will have our own canned, diced tomatoes and whatnot for soups, chilis, etc later in the year.  But I thought these would be a good start.

I just transplated our hot peppers on Wednesday as well.  They are still fairly small, but they take longer to germinate compared to the tomatoes (which seemed to sprout after only a couple days) so I'm not too concerned.  Last year the hot peppers that we started failed miserably...but I'm sick of buying chili powder so I'm determined to get a good pepper crop so I can dry and grind up my own.

Once all of the tomatoes, peppers, and various herbs had been successfully transplanted to their new 'pots' I started the next round of peppers and tomatoes (and rosemary).  Although it doesn't seem like alot right now, so we're going to order another couple seed packets of tomatoes to be sure we have enough (hopefully) to keep us covered until next year's crop comes in.

After realizing that we have 1000 square feet of garden the other night I've been kind of cutting loose with my ordering plans.  I added black beans and kidney beans into my shopping cart so hopefully we won't have to buy those this winter either.  I also ordered 12.5 pounds of seed potatos from Fedco today, who came highly recommended from a friend of ours.  I got a combination of storage potatos- and knowing how many potatos we eat I sincerely hope this will provide enough for us.

We'll order the rest of our seeds from High Mowing Seeds, I've got my shopping cart all filled, all I need to do is check with Kyle to be sure he doesn't want some strange something-or-other that I hadn't thought of.