I have learned that I am a very poor blogger, I don't update the blog anywhere near as much as I should.  Maybe I will get better at this over time... or maybe I won't, haha.  So in this post, I will take you from freshly planted tomato and pepper seeds to now transplanting the tomato plants inside the high tunnel.

Freshly planted seeds

The first seedlings are starting to come up and see the light

More seedlings coming up, mostly tomatoes in this picture

In process of transplanting tomato seedlings

More of the tomato transplant process

Planted the first row of seeds into the high tunnel on April 8th.  There is a mix of plants in this row, carrots, onions, beets, lettuce, spinach, mesclun mix and kale.

The happy tomato plants under the lights

Planted the second row of seeds in the high tunnel, mostly onions and beets with some parsnips and tunips as well on April 14th.

The baby pepper plants have now been transplanted and have moved onto the shelves.

The tomato plants are getting pretty big

We started to harvest radishes from our test planting on April 20th, I think these are beautiful!

Freshly tilled soil, ready for transplanting tomato plants.  You can see my sweet wife on the left as well as the row of radishes, in the middle are bunching onions and the spinach and kale, then on the right are the two rows that I planted previously, but since I haven't weeded in a while all you see is weeds on that side.

On April 28th we started to transplant tomatoes

We put hotkaps (covers) over the transplanted tomatoes and then tented the rest of the tomatoes that are still in the pots.  It got down to 29 degrees inside the high tunnel last night but looking at all the tomatoes this morning they still all look great, the weather forcast says it shouldn't get below freezing for the next 10 days, so that should help the tomatoes get established.

Today I will continue to plant the tomatoes and work on getting the micro irrigation system installed and working so we can get water to these little guys.

We now have 171 tomato seedlings coming up, still no peppers.

We got our seeds started in the seed trays on Sunday.  Yesterday, there were 3 little tomato sprouts coming up and today I counted 72.  Not bad, but there are a total of 270 tomatoes that we started.  None of the peppers have started to come up yet, they aren't supposed to start coming up until 14-21 days after planting.

We started our seeds a little late this year on purpose, we aren't really equipped to have a large scale nursery in our living room, so when all these little plants are ready to get transplanted out of the seed trays then we will start to run out of space pretty quickly.  Next year we should have better shelving and lights, etc.  Also, if the plants are a little smaller when we plant them in the high tunnel then they won't have transplant shock quite as bad as the larger plants, so the recovery time will be shorter.

Yesterday, I finished installing the walk-through door on the high tunnel.  It was such a nice day outside even though the temperature didn't get over 40, it was 75 inside the high tunnel with the sun beating down on it.  Our radishes are starting to come up and our spinach is growing strong, I had a fresh spinach salad after I finished the door.

And then we woke up to a fresh layer of snow this morning, you gotta love the Montana weather.

Now that the snow is starting to melt, it is making me anxious to get out working inside the high tunnel.  I went out a couple days ago to check on the inside.  You can see the snow was piled high along the outside but even with our long, cold winter we have spinach growing right now, from our test planting last Fall.

I took these pictures yesterday, the snow built up on the East side of the high tunnel so high that it was starting to have trouble sliding off but the snow is melting today, so we should be ok.

Here is a picture from March 1st, the side wall of the high tunnel is about 6'-6" tall and you can see the snow slide off has been building up and is nearly as tall as the wall.  We have all of our seed packets and will probably start the seeds inside our house this week or next weekend, I know we are slightly late on getting the seeds started, but since we don't  have heat in the high tunnel this year and we don't have a lot of room inside the house to dedicate to a month or month and a half of seed trays and plants, we thought it would be best to wait.  We also feel that the smaller plants will do better with the transplant shock when we do move them out into the high tunnel, so we can catch up a few days in that exchange as well.