Spring Update: The Little Tomato Seedling That Could

The garden is making steady progress, now that the weather is warming.  Leafy greens are coming in strong, along with a handful of French breakfast radishes and a ton of volunteer mint.  My Fun Jen frilly bok choy is thriving, it'll be a good year for stir fries.  My carrots and quinoa have started to sprout, and my Brussels sprouts are really starting to leaf out. In the herb bin, little is sprouting, but I transplanted my one successful lemon balm seedling, and my one successful parsely, which are both doing just fine.  Cilantro is coming up strong, and I think I spotted one or two dill sprouts.  Fingers crossed!

I've pulled about a dozen volunteer gourd seedlings out of the garden.  Not that I wouldn't want another group of bird house gourds to carve as gifts for Christmas, but the plants are enormous and I have no room for them, as I'm hoping to grow pumpkins in their place.

Today I transplanted three of my strongest tomato seedlings outside, as they were getting to large for the indoor seeding station. 

About two weeks ago, I was acclimating my tomatoes to the outdoors when I accidentally snapped the largest one clean in half at the base of the stem, leaving it hanging on by a thread of green.  Unwilling to let my strongest seedling die due to sheer clumsiness, I quickly burried the plant up to the first set of leaves.  I had hope, as I remembered from last year that as I was pruning lower branches from my tomato plants, I noticed a large branch I had cut had fallen cut side down into the soil and was rooting itself.  Sure enough, two weeks later, the tomato is doing just fine.  Plants are shockingly tough.  I suppose they have to be to survive in the ridiculous weather with constant animal assaults.

Tomato Mayhem!

Despite the fact that I've discovered a strong infestation of squash borers, which have ruined all of my summer squash and sugar pumpkins, I can at least report some successes: namely, I have a veritable conucopia of tomatoes! More tomatoes than I know what to do with! How much you ask? Well, this photo was taken after I gave away quite a few to my landlord upstairs.  The black krim are actually somewhat mauve colored, often with green tops.  They're really tasty too, sweet and rich and succulent.  The speckled romans are fewer in number, but just as exciting! And I have approximately ten million pear cherry tomatoes.  Well more than anyone needs.  Time to get roasting!

The best way to store tomatoes is to leave them in a clean, cool, preferably dark place, like a drawer, where they won't bake in the sun or rot due to dampness.  DO NOT put them in the fridge, unless you only want to use them for cooking.  Refrigeration tends to dull the flavor intensity of a home grown tomato. 

Also pictured is my largest head of broccoli to date and one solitary lemon cucumber.  Can you identify the lonely cucumber? I plan on making a pasta with the broccoli and cherry tomatoes and some homemade pesto.  Other ideas include a tomato salad, and perhaps some experimentation with sauces and jarring is in order! Oh the possibilities are endless with abundant tomatoes!

-Jen

It's not easy being green.... when it's 95 degrees out!!!

Bell Peppers... soon to be golden. Held up by an awesome veggie supportThat being said, most of my veggies are performing admirably! Despite the heat, they are showing minimal droop & maximum flowering power.

The pepper plants all of little green babies on them- one of the mystery "hot mix" seems to be a Thai hot pepper of some kind, producing long green spindly peppers with quite a kick. The pepper plants are so nice and compact I should have planted more but hey, I forgot. The Jalapenos have already produced a good first harvest (the making of poppers and photos will follow) and the Golden bell plants are producing nicely shaped little green friends that will turn golden as they mature. I have to recommend the pepper supports I bought this year, they have been great during the summer rain storms when the plants are heavy with fruit and their little stems have trouble holding them all up under the downpour. If you get heavy rains it is a must to keep the plants from tipping over and the fruit rotting.

The eggplants this year are fantastic! I think crop rotation played a factor in this (as well as my superior seedling growing/management this year) because the eggplants are all in the section where the beans grew last year. Beans are great for 're-building' soil, which plants like tomatoes, peppers, corn, eggplant, etc. are known for being heavy feeders and stripping the earth of nutrients. Be sure if your garden is too small to rotate that you focus on extra fertilizing & compost additions throughout the growing season.

Totally freaky Mystery squash!I'm not sure what is to blame for the sub-par state of my tomatoes this year. Could be the heat, could be some are in poor soil-- the performance of some of the plants is much better than the others in different parts of the garden-- could be that I used too much nitrogen in the soil, which makes leafy tomato plants that produce very little fruit.... not sure. Time will tell if they were a complete bust or not.

But my Mystery Squash, which sprouted from some kind of seed in the compost I'm guessing, is doing GREAT. It is growing and flowering like crazy- I've already had to prune it several times to keep it from harassing the soybeans! I can't wait to find out what it will produce! These little surprises are truly one of the joys of using your own compost haha.

More updates on Corn and Melons to come!

Stay Cool,

Kate

Summer of Tomatoes and... Gourds?

Oh the humanity! The last hours of my summer squash.The garden has gotten a bit out of whack, hence my long pause between posts.  The worst news of all, my summer squash have all died!  My nemesis, the squirrel, was somehow breaking into my bird-netting barrier and had been stealing my newly formed summer squash.  To prevent the loss of more squash, I decided to bind all of the plants with a second layer of netting.  But the binding proved to be rough on the plants, which quickly became overcrowded.  As the July temperatures skyrocketed into the high 90s, the leaves began to brown.  To compensate, I began dousing the bundled plants with bucketloads of water.  In the next two weeks, the plants began to wither and when I finally unwrapped them, I found mass rotting along the main stems, all the way to the soil line.  I’m not entirely sure if this was my error or if I was visited by evil squash borer larvae.  After doing some research on my problem, I came across a list of symptoms identical to what I witnessed in my squash plants.  I’m not entirely sure if I’ve seen adult squash borers flying around the garden, but I think I may have seen one or two, not realizing the terrors they really were. 

In any event, I’m sad to see the squash die before I had a chance to sample them.  I replanted a few seeds in hopes of a late summer harvest, but I don’t know if I planted them in time.  The sites I’ve consulted recommend plantings in early July to avoid the egg laying season of squash borers.  We’ll see what happens…

But amid the tragedy of lost squash plants, I have had some successes.  My tomato vines are overwhelming me with produce.  I’ve been able to sample all three varieties.  My favorite is the black krim, whose produce is extremely juicy with a slightly sweet, refreshing flesh. 

Blossom end rot: not pretty.Early on, my speckled roman tomatoes suffered from a bout of blossom end rot due to under watering.  BER is an ugly affliction caused by a lack of calcium, either because there isn’t enough calcium in the soil or because the plant isn’t receiving enough water to carry minerals into the plant.  I had sprinkled lime into the soil to raise calcium content when I planted my vegetables, so I knew I had enough calcium, I just needed to increase my watering.  Once I did so, the rest of the tomatoes formed perfectly.  You can still consume tomatoes suffering from BER, you just need to cut out the rotten parts.

Elsewhere, I have the most handsome herb pot in the history of my garden exploits.  I was able to pull bunches of Genovese, lemon, and lime basil to make delicious pesto.  If you pour the pesto into plastic ziplock bags, you can lay them flat in the freezer and have pesto all winter long, if you want. 

I have large heads of broccoli coming in.  I’ve been avoiding harvest, just to see how big they’ll get, but I’ll need to pick them soon, before they begin flowering.  If you cut the broccoli near the thick leaves of the base, more heads will emerge in its place, giving you a second harvest. 

My biggest surprise was the success of the gourds.  They’ve climbed all the way up my landlord’s staircase to her 2^nd floor deck! Along the way they’ve sprouted dozens of tiny gourds, which have begun to grow into bulbous behemoths.  I was delighted to find one today larger than my hand!

Some victories, some losses, but the garden endures.  Stay tuned for further updates.  I’ll let you know if I ever end up with squash… or beans for that matter! I still have no beans!

-Jen

Jen's Midsummer Report

When will my black krim tomatoes turn black??Greenery everywhere but not a drop to eat! The garden looks gorgeous and lush, but I’m anxious for more produce to stock my kitchen! Here’s an update on my garden progress:

I harvested every last pea I was able to grow.  The vines were beginning to brown and I knew the time of peas was coming to an end, so I picked every pod, regardless of how round they were.  The thinner ones were delicious eaten whole, and I had sweet peas for days to dip in containers of hummus or just eat by themselves.  After the harvest, I pulled up the vines and laid them across the soil, intending to chop them into the soil for the next round of planting. 

I was able to pull most of my tonda di parigi carrots, which were absolutely delicious.  I’m sure they can grow larger than they were when I pulled them, but I was impatient.  I have since reseeded the carrot container, mixing in the greenery of the previously harvested carrots to help replenish the nutrients of the soil. 

I have lots of baby squashes coming in, but none that I’ve been able to coax to maturity.  It seems the squirrels found a way into my protective netting, and each time a baby squash grew to a certain size, it was snatched away, vine and all, by a hungry creature.  I now have a new layer of netting enveloping the plants closely.  They don’t seem happy to be confined so tightly, but I don’t know what else to do! I eagerly await summer squash for dinner!

My tomatoes are enormous, full and lush, but they’re all green! I guess I can’t complain, most people I’ve Carrots, peas, and broccoli!spoken with say their plants aren’t anywhere near as progressed as mine, but every day I wake up and see they haven’t changed color at all, I’m a little disappointed.  A note about tomatoes: this year I planted two vines per cage.  This was an improvement over my big mess of vines in one container from last year, but still caused overcrowding.  To help keep the plants healthy, I began pruning the vines, eliminating all branches on the lower parts of the main stem, and the suckers from the stronger branches.  Suckers, for those not in the know, are the smaller branches that emerge at the fork of larger branches and the main stem.  They divert nutrients from the larger branches, thus the term “suckers.”  I also removed branches that grew too densely into other plants, to ensure each plant was receiving its fair share of sunlight.  For every branch pruned, the theory goes, each tomato receives a greater share of nutrients, thus creating tastier tomatoes overall.  You just need to make sure there are enough leaves to create the sugars and fuel that develop the fruit properly. 

My broccoli has formed several small florets.  Nothing enormous, but I’m growing a variety known for creating smaller buds, more frequently.  There are far too many enormous broccoli plants now sitting in my garden bed, and I’m soon going to have to thin them out or I may never see any more broccoli buds.

My pumpkin and gourd vines have taken over the world! I tied my pumpkin vines up so they would have room to grow skyward instead of crowding the vegetables around them.  So far, its grown up to the top of the fence surrounding the garden, and along it to my back door, where I trimmed it back, so it wouldn’t invade the adjacent garden of my irate neighbor.  Meanwhile, the gourds are growing up my landlord’s banister and across the empty pea trellis, creating a wall of giant lovely leaves.

Now that's one fine herb pot! Genovese basil, lemon & lime basil, parsley, thyme, dill, mint, and oregano.I have a handful of blackberries ripening on the vine.  So far I’ve been able to harvest four, but they were the four best tasting blackberries I’ve ever had!

My cucumber vines have so far produced two tiny lemon cukes, which were delicious! But they’re suffering in the heat and I realized a little too late I’d need to water them more frequently than I had been.  I planted a few more seeds to see if I could get a few more vines to join in, but its pretty late to start new vines, so I’ll concentrate on rehabilitating the three remaining survivors.

And finally, I have no beans! I’m sorely disappointed with my scarlet runner beans, they grew to six feet in height, and produce lovely red flowers, but they haven’t produced a single bean pod! I recently read that in high heat, pole beans will often drop their flowers instead of fruiting.  When this occurs, beans will form late in the summer, so I’m hoping I’ll see some by August, but its really put a damper in my expectations of beans all summer.

So that’s the midsummer report.  Some wins, some losses, but overall, I just love working in my garden.  Stay tuned!

-Jen