first tomatoes and other garden news

[songbird]

from the beefsteak plants. i picked about a dozen yesterday and had my first toasted tomato sandwich.

the cherry tomatoes have three red-orange tomatoes on them. between two plants. that's just odd here. usually they are loaded and ready a week or two before the beefsteaks.

yesterday i finally got the garlic out of the ground, with the rains we've had the past few weeks it's just been too wet and yesterday wasn't much better but at least i wasn't muddy. after getting the garlic out of the ground i still had so much dirt on them that i hosed them off. this really was a mistake. after i noticed that some of them were already starting to get mold on them it's just not a good thing to have them wet again.

so i had big box tops and extra towels to lay them out to dry and rotated them a few times. i'll be doing the same today.

as for the size of the garlic heads, most were excellent, as i had planted the largest cloves from the previous harvest. spacing them out a bit more seemed to help too. it made it much easier for weeding to have a little more room in between the plants.

picked more green and wax beans the other day and made a three bean salad (with onion).

finally checked the squash plants and saw some already full sized fruits on them. moved a few branches so they don't smother the nearby bush and to keep them out of the sunflowers.

some of my first pea plantings that were eaten by the groundhogs have sprung back and are now flowering like they should have three weeks ago. with all the rain and cooler weather perhaps they will actually bear a crop. as some were from my special select peas that i am trying to increase my seed supplies this is good news. haven't seen a groundhog in a few weeks now

*knocks on wood head*. the snap peas really did not germinate well this season so a few of those growing would be nice to see too. seems like i had a hard time getting them going last year too.

other things are ready, but i'm not going to be doing much other than some digging today to get the garden around the garlic all turned and the edge weeded so that the plants don't drop seeds into the neighboring limestone pathway. if i'm smart i'll do the edge weeding first as when i get digging i tend to work until i can't do much else for a while.

songbird

[songbird]

we've hardly had to run the AC this summer, most often we've had it on to dehumidify. i've been cold this week a few times as we've made it down into the 40sF.

i did pick the first larger batch of tomatoes yesterday and today will be putting some of them up. the only reason we grew extra plants this year above eating them fresh is so that we can put some up as we are low on tomato chunks. plenty of green tomatoes out there so we should eventually have another round, but i keep hoping for more sunshine and heat to help things along. today is starting cloudy and supposedly due to rain again.

the ever bearing strawberries are flowering again after their normal break from the first crop.

:) more truck parts on order?

no, seems not, it's very hard to build a place that needs very little maintenance. i just hope to keep shifting things from "useless maintenance" to more fruitful sorts.

:) i'm digging and sifting through some containers i used to sprout tulip seeds. the last four large ones will be interesting to get through they are stuffed in the bottom with gravel and empty plastic jugs. i was hoping that they would not be quite so heavy, but i think the end effect was a wash. just have to find a large enough box top to use on the desk so it won't scratch the surface.

we had no BER this year on any of the tomatoes i've picked. only one was dragging in the dirt long enough for the worms to get at it and do a little damage.

i'm surprised to see the peas bouncing back the way they've been. i've never had a pea crop that made it through July that was worth much of anything.

Ajo rojo was very colorful, i'll probably try a few cloves again this coming year to see if it will acclimate and improve, but not too many.

i ended up pulling several beans plants out that were not like the other surrounding beans, the young pods were edible and ok, but not as good as the surrounding plants. likely cross breeds from the previous season. the older pods were too tough and like chewing on cardboard for all the flavor they had. with the cool weather the rest of the beans are still doing ok.

Ma doesn't like cucumbers enough for us to grow them again here, so we've put that space into squash plants. i'm hoping the other plants are melons but no fruit has set of yet for me to know. plenty of flowers...

i'm not seeing little black beetles that bore here so i'll knock on wood and hope they don't show up.

probably. :)

oh yeah, the less digging i have to do the better by far, but i don't have enough materials always on hand to smother/mulch gardens as they become available. right now i'm out of everything except for a few small newspapers. not many gardens here i can use my fingers in down beyond a quarter inch without breaking them. for those i have a dull knife to get the weeds that won't come out easily.

hard to imagine that in about four more weeks we'll likely start getting frosts again. this season is going by very quickly.

if i can get that garden turned in the next few days then i can probably try to plant it with peas for a fall crop.

songbird

[songbird]

it is amazing how some things can change. the tomato crop looked really good on the

9th, picked about 20lbs on the 16th and they were great.

from the distance everything kept looking great and i was due to pick and process again several days ago except almost the entire crop was rotting on the vine. after looking at the on-line resources it seems to be buckeye rot but they say it affects tomatoes from contact with the ground and most of these are not in contact with the ground at all.

neither of us has seen this rot before and it isn't like the other spots of rot that am familiar with where i can cut the spot away and leave the rest of the fruit to be used. it seems to affect the whole fruit rapidly. i can smell it being off even after cutting away the obvious rotten part and some significant margin besides.

i'm suspecting that the cold snap of several weeks ago is the likely culprit for setting things up so badly. all plants in several different areas (with different soils) are affected. many have now lost most of their leaves (but the stems are still green and look healthy). i'm hoping the newer green fruits will come through.

the other day i picked about 50lbs and ended up burying about half that as rotten. today i picked about 60lbs and all but

10lbs were rotten. i still have more to pick tomorrow.

the cherry tomatoes seem to be ok for now and are coming along well.

songbird