Lettuce alone (not)

The frost cloth worked fairly well to protect lettuce and spinach seedlings. You can see some of the drip tubing grid in this picture. Because the seeds were so small, I sprinkled them along each drip line rather than trying to put two or three seeds at each drip emitter. I thought the ones that weren't in close proximity to the drips wouldn't germinate. I was wrong, which means at some point I should do some thinning here.

My fall planting of lettuce and spinach in another location didn't do so well. I planted it in an area where I had done a spring planting of pepper transplants. The peppers had struggled all summer and I thought I'd leave them there a while longer, so that their scrawny skeletons would give a bit of shade to the germinating seeds. The good news is that the peppers really took off after it cooled off, and turned into nice bushy plants with many peppers. The bad news is that they completely crowded out the lettuce and spinach seedlings, so I've had to actually buy lettuce for salads this winter.

We got a little bit of rain today, which was nice. That's something we don't get very often here.