One Ugly Tomato

At this point in the year I typically look out at my garden and assess its success.

This year: pathetic.

beans: have climbed the trellis up and down and sideways (making a fun tunnel for Jonathan) but have yet to produce one bean or one flower

cucumbers: out of 6 plants, yield = 2. One ripened when I was out of town and got too big by the time I got home. One we ate.

onions: small harvest of small onions.

okra: plants look very nice, but seem to produce only 1 or 2 pods per week- which makes it difficult to use in the kitchen

peppers: as always they are limping along. so far 1 pepper

basil: half the plants died, the other half are enough to keep us supplied with pesto.

Of my large tomato plants, only one has produced anything more than food for hornworms. And it is quite possibly the ugliest tomato I have ever seen:

The only decent spot in the garden is my collection of Roma tomato plants. The leaves are being eaten by flea-beetles and so they look pretty bad, but they are still producing like crazy.

All of this begs the question of whether it is worth it or not. Honestly I don't put that much work into the garden (and I suppose it shows). So for the time invested a few cucumbers, peppers, basil and a plethora of Romas isn't too bad. But I am always so disappointed when I survey the plants in August and begin to pull up the ones that have not and will not produce for whatever reason. Alas. Maybe next year will I will be more diligent and have a better crop.

Onions!!

We got back from vacation last night, and by 10:30 am I am already overwhelmed with produce.

Before we left, our garden was limping along at its typical pace:

beans struggling up a trellis and cucumbers refusing to grow

tomatoes, basil, and okra

onions that for some reason chose to lay down instead of growing upright

Jonathan helped me survey and do some harvesting in our own garden this morning. Before we left, the onions were close to being done, and when we got back all of their little tops had completely fallen over and turned brown. So we dug them up and set them out to cure.

Many of them remained quite small, but we got a few decent sized ones. Enough to justify $3.99 in sets. We also got a few handfuls of Roma tomatoes (these are the ones that made it out of the garden before being eaten). The beans and okra are shaping up to be failures this year, but the cucumber plants have a few baby cukes.

We then picked up our CSA for the week, and HOLY COW!

I had forgotten what summer bounty they sometimes give us! 4 cucumbers, 4 ears of corn, 1 cantelope, 2 patty-pan squash, an eggplant, an onion, 1 green pepper, and 4 huge tomatoes. The watermelon was our own seperate purchase, but Jonathan and I can probably polish most of it off before the weekend is over! Any ideas for what to do with patty-pans?

when a mommy flower loves a daddy flower...

I'm learning a lot in my garden this summer. For example, squash flowers are gender specific. The boy flowers have just a stalk and a flower:

But the girl flowers have a tiny immature squash looking thing just below the flower:

To end up with a baby squash, pollen from a boy flower must reach the girl flower. Then the immature squash will be able to develop into its own seed-bearing squash. One of the problems I have been having with my squash is that it seems to be producing only one flower at a time. Mostly boy flowers. So when I noticed yesterday that there were three flowers blooming at once and that one was a boy and two were girls, I was super excited. But the other garden-wide problem in our yard this year is that there is a serious dearth of bees to do the pollenating.

The bee shortage has also been affecting my tomatoes, who are producing heaps of flowers but no fruit. Many tomatoes are self-pollinting, but still require insects (bees) to either carry pollen around or to stamp their little feet on the flowers, vibrating enough to knock the pollen off and into the right spot. For the past few days I have been out with my paintbrush buzzing from flower to flower tapping on them and transferring pollen from tomato to tomato.

So rather than trust that one would bumble its way into our yard yesterday for the squash, I rolled up my sleeves to do the dirty work myself. I took my little paintbrush and carefully transferred pollen from the boy flower to each of the girls. I'm hopeful that my efforts will pay off, but a little annoyed that the bees are falling down on the job. I may have to start investigating plants that will lure them back into our yard.

garlic

Yesterday I noticed the tops of my garlic plants were all mostly brown and that there were these odd growths on the stems of some of the plants. I thought at first they might be flowering, but the growths were not at the top of the stalks, and are hard about the size of chickpeas. The are purplish white and smell and have the texture of tiny, spherical garlic cloves I planted- so maybe they are new sprouting cloves?

I don't know, but I decided to harvest the plants today. When I planted my garlic last fall, I had visions of harvesting a crop of huge perfect looking garlics and braiding them into a beautiful rope that would be both useful and decorative. Most of them are decently sized, a few are tiny and none are huge. And it turns out braiding them isn't so hard, unless you care what the braid looks like in the end. They haven't dried/cured yet, so the bulbs are still fresh with dirt, but this isn't what I pictured! Alas. I guess now the question is whether we eat this crop, or I save it for replanting in the fall..

Garden Update 6/23/10

Since it is too hot to actually go outside and work in the garden today, pictures will have to do!

From left to right (top to bottom) these are:

1) the amazing day lilies a friend from work gave me 2 years ago- LOVE them

2) bean/squash trellis- bean side

3) bean/squash trellis- squash side: 2 of my 3 plants developed a grey fungus thing and had to be cut down completely- alas. I'm hoping the third plant stays heathy and is able to pollinate itself so we get some butternuts!

4) One of my new square-foot boxes. Tomatoes in the back, peppers then basil and then my struggling carrots

5) Yay tomatoes!!

6) Zinnia planted from seed!! Planting things from seed seems miraculous to me. When I buy a plant, I expect it to stay a plant and produce veggies or flowers or whatever. But when I buy a seed, it seems magical!

7) Heirloom tomatoes planted from seed!! Again amazement. And at one point this spring I was going to throw these seedlings out because they didn't seem to be thriving! Now they are waist hight and doing great!!

8) Deck boxes. (Mom these always make me think of you!)

9) 2nd bean trellis and onions. My onions are all laying down as they have been doing almost since we planted them. I don't know if this is normal or not- probably not. But they are producing little red bulbs that are crowning above the soil (and keep tempting me to pick them!)

My potatoes have gotten some sort of purple spotting disease on their leaves (I think I planted them too close together) and so I'm not counting on them. And my garlic is going fine- just not very picturesque.

So far the produce I have gathered:

• 1 gloriously delicious plum tomato
• enough basil to make a good batch of pesto
• 2 onions whose tops got mowed over and had to be picked
• 2 banana peppers

Early Garden Pics

Its that time of year when the sunshine and just right warm weather makes me crazy to get outside and grow something. All winter my mind was hoping and planning for summer and what I'd grow and where. And after sneaking in garden work during nap times on weekends for a few weeks, the garden is finally starting to take the shape I'd had in mind all winter!

I've got two new raised beds I'm planning to do with the "square foot gardening" method- (carrots and basil seeds went in the ground this morning). I have potatoes in containers and two new trellises for growing beans. (I'm trying a French climbing bean for eating green and an heirloom variety for drying). I put my onion sets in a few weeks ago and my garlic is still going strong from this fall! The leaves of the tomato, pepper, and basil plants I started from seed 4 weeks ago have all contracted some sort of white-spotty disease something or other. So I think I'm going to be buying plants again this year. I will not let the death of those plants dishearten me at this point!

fall gardening

This weekend I finally got out (a little) in the garden.

My sweet peppers had a hard time this year. Between something critter eating their leaves, planting too early and who know what else, we just didn't get the yield I had last year from my jalapenos. Maybe sweet peppers are harder than hot ones? I don't know. But I started these from seed and despite the fact that they are supposed to be orange peppers, I am still proud of the result:

And my dwarf pomegranate tree produced 5 mini-pomegranates!! I ate one standing right there on the deck, the others made it into the kitchen. I probably should have let them ripen a little more (since they are rather tart and more pinkish than deep red), but I was getting nervous about the cooling nights.

My beets are sprouting! I mulched around them yesterday and will probably need to thin them soon (I hate cutting some of them down though)

The lettuce seeds I planted 3 weeks ago are coming up and looking nice. I planted the second half yesterday so hopefully we'll have home grown lettuce for a while!


Sadly, the spinach sprouts I thought were coming up well turn out to be only weeds :( I think I have problem with spinach. Last year mine bolted before we got any good leaves!!

caterpillars

I found a bunch of these little guys on my parsley today. And while I love the idea of diverse and healthy ecosystems, I don't actually like bugs. Plus they were eating and killing my parsley plant. So I picked them off of the plant, and put a few of them in a make-shift terrarium (a large vase covered with wax-paper) with some leaves and sticks on our kitchen counter. I'm hoping for butterflies!

last of the tomatoes

This afternoon while Jonathan was napping, I finally got out to the garden. I mixed our compost into one of our garden beds so it is ready for the beets I am planning to plant, picked the last of the tomatoes, and then pulled up the tomato plants. They had a good run this summer and probably could have given me a few more tomatoes over the next month, but they were getting leggy and falling over and I was tired of them. It feels good to have the bed empty!!

Now I am left with the question of what to do with green tomatoes. I have never picked them green before and I don't know if they will ripen if I give them a week or so, or if I should go ahead and do something with them now...