Gardening (for the clueless).

We decided we wanted a little vegetable patch.  Before we have only rented houses so haven't been able to actually plant anything in the ground.  There was a dead spot of grass where the previous owners had a child's trampoline, so we decided to get a little raised bed.  A few days before we had got a bunch of tomato and pepper plants, an eggplant/aubergine, and some basil which were doing nicely in pots on our patio.

I dug out the grass in the area we wanted to put it (which turned out to have quite a few roots from a tree that is about 12 feet or so away on the outside of our fence) and then we placed the raised bed, and filled it with soil mixed with cow manure.  Then I replanted all the plants out of their pots.








All looked well to start with, the peppers looked a bit droopy but I thought they were probably just shocked and would perk up.








However, the next day they weren't looking so great.  The peppers were the first to look a bit rough, they had perked up but their leaves looked a bit brown.  A couple of days later they looked worse, and the basil had big black spots on it.  I wasn't sure what was happening so turned to google and thought maybe it was a fungal thing from the soil.  So I got some organic spray.  However now I've done some more research I think we used too much cow manure and the plants got burned.  Some of them have recovered okay, but some of the peppers seem to be stunted and some of the tomato plants have yet to grow any fruit (I've got one that is fruiting).  So this may be a good lesson.  I've bought a few more pepper plants, so I may just swap out the stunted ones.  I also decided to build a worm tower for my bed....