Garden store adventure, with unintended tragic consequences?

Yesterday I was running some errands in Gulberg (looking for the Oxford University Press store to pick up Tariq Rahman's latest) and we drove past a seed store that has caught my eye before but I've never actually gone. I got out of the car telling myself I was just going to look around. Sure.

Their website is: http://prideseedstore.com/index.html

I started chatting with Ashfaq, an employee, who gave me some advice on what things I should be planting. I ended up choosing beans (a red speckled variety) and some herbs: basil, oregano, rosemary. I've never planted herbs from seed before but I'm hopeful. He also gave me, as a gift, three little plants: an okra, a cucumber, and a vegetable called tar (Cucumis utilissimus).

The spoils...I had already planted the okra.

I also picked up some compost--real compost, not awful clay stuff--and some coconut husk stuff to mix with it, and I almost bought a hummingbird feeder but restrained myself. And good thing too, because that bag of compost cost 1800 rupees! Which is ridiculous. That's like $18. The guy gave me a nice little discount but still, DAMN. That's like half of the entire amount I have spent on my garden from day one. I almost wanted to tell him to forget it but paid up like a chump because he had been so nice. I guess quality potting medium is really hard to come by here. And it was 100 liters of quality potting medium, so maybe not a horrible deal? 18 rupees a liter of awesome, loamy, fragrant, soft black compost?

Then of course, since I had more plants to plant, I was going to need more pots. We swung by the row of nurseries at Kalma Chowk and looked around for a good deal. The first guy quoted us a price of 300 rupees for a pot similar to the ones I got at the DHA nursery for half that amount. Then he tried to convince us that we should buy these pots from Peshawar because somehow Peshawari clay was stronger...it didn't make a lot of sense, so we left. The next nursery the guy showed us the exact same pot for only 120 rupees. Sold. I got three big ones and three small ones (the small ones were only 30 rupees each). He picked them out for my by striking them with his hand. If the pot made a clear ringing sound then there were no cracks, if the sound was softer and dull then he put it back. I never knew this about pots.

Pot selection

Testing the sound of the pots

We packed up the pots and headed back to the house, where once I got everything upstairs (of course I was only allowed to carry the small pots) I started mixing soil and coconut husk and arranging everything and planting the new seeds. This is where I may have made my fatal mistake. I was so excited about the compost being better quality than the horrible clay I've been using so far that I decided to transplant my cucumbers into it. I am too much of an idiot to leave well enough alone, apparently. My beautiful cucumbers that were growing so well did not take the transplantation well, and now are droopy and sad and I am worried they will die, setting me back like a month in terms of cucumber production. Stupid. I watered everything well but as of this morning only one of them seems to be perking up.

Current configuration

I have beans in the two large pots to the left, then a pot with the cucumber and tar that Ashfaq gave me, then my sad droopy formerly gorgeous cucumbers, then two pots with bitter melon (since I still have only three plants and want four I planted some more bitter melon seeds, I can't figure out why the one spot will not produce!), then two pots with squash. In the front there are three large pots with okra plants and at the front left three small pots in which I planted basil, rosemary, and oregano. I have no experience growing herbs from seed so it may not work at all, but it's a fun experiment.

Fingers are crossed for the survival of my sad sad cucumbers...