Wilting away

So apparently this is what happens when you have soil block seedlings sitting in a hot, dry apartment and forget to water them for the first time before you run out the door to work.

Yup.  I tried some recovery water when I got home, but I suspect all but two are goners.  They were the "italian sweet peppers" from home depot and had been doing great.  Until today. 

There really isn't much I can do to control the heat or humidity in my apartment.  I live above the main entry way so the temperature in the lobby determines the temperature in my apartment.  Attempts to cool down the place short of leaving the windows open all day are unsuccessful.  As for humidity, I have a bedroom humidifier and a small one in my office.  Neither is big enough that it would be able to treat my whole apartment.

A check on my other seedlings.  The orange blossom tomatos are doing lousy independent of whether they are in the plastic cells or seed blocks.   The valley girl reds are doing marginally better, but not fantastic.  The eggplants are finally getting tall enough that they are at a do-or-die stage this weekend.    To the left are the other peppers, the "carnival" peppers, or full size non-green bell peppers.  Those seem to be doing better in their tupperware containers.  I think it retains moisture better than the regular plastic trays.

My peapods outside seem to have had an identity crisis.  While some of the plants are growing up the bamboo stake two of them decided to flower and bud peapods much too early.  The plants are so small they can barely hold the weight of a three pea pod.

My cucumber plants seem to have caught some sort of a disease or are dealing with sun-stroke.  While the soda bottles work wonders at keeping plants alive during the cold nights, remembering to take the bottles off during warm days (especially last weekend when  I wasn't home) seems to have doomed half of my cucumber plants.  I'm assuming they got steamed too much over last weekend and developed a white blanched look; I'm going to guess that recovery is slim at this point.

I guess the good news is that I still have plenty of seed soil (from dead plants) and some seeds that I can try again with most of the species.  I don't have much tomato seeds left though - the "mini" packets from Johnny's didn't leave much room for error.  The rest I am going to give another try, including the lettuce seedlings that failed last month.