Harvest Monday 28 July 2014

 

My gardening style is all about laziness. Not surprisingly, my landscaping style runs similar but it has its advantages. For example, if I had cleared out the brambles under the Kousa dogwood last year, would I have this bowl of black raspberries today? Probably not. But I have resolved, as soon as the raspberries are all picked, I will deal with the brambles.

 

The garden is coming up to full production. I’m still cutting chard and pulled a few beets. Usually my chard is bolt resistant (after all, it is a biennial) but I had one plant start to bolt. It was the Magenta Sunset and I read somewhere that pink or red stalked varieties were more likely to prematurely bolt.

 

 

Plenty of kale and collard greens.

 

 

The bell peppers are from Revolution, a bell that is supposed to produce thick walled peppers in the North. I gave up on bells and plant smaller varieties like Lipstick because I get better yield and quality. But since I killed a lot of my pepper starts, I grabbed a pack of these to try. These peppers are from the in-ground plants, the raised bed equivalents have marble size peppers on them. And that is my first Pingtung eggplant.

 

 

More beans and squash. Beans are being picked almost daily. I read in Johnny’s catalog that the size and even the existence of a green spot on the end of the Y-Star patty pan is variable depending on heat and plant stress. The plant looks pretty happy to me, I don’t think it is being stressed. And it is an F-1 hybrid so cross-pollination shouldn’t be an issue.

 

 

Four kinds of beans are being harvested. Clockwise from upper right, Gold Marie, first picking of Jade, Provider and Musica. The Provider beans went into a batch of refrigerator dilly beans, using this recipe.

 

 

Tomatoes and my first cucumber, a Jackson Classic pickler. I’m harvesting the tomatoes as soon as they start to show color to keep the birds from destroying them. I have lost almost a dozen of the Juliet tomatoes to the birds so far. They have not bothered the other tomato varieties but I don’t want to take a chance. The large tomato is a Big Beef, with a couple of Jaune Flamme below it. The cherries are Esterina, which are supposed to be more crack resistant than Sungold, but notice the blossom end rot on two of them! I have never had BER on a cherry tomato before.

 

 

That's all from my garden and weed patch in Bolton. To see what other gardeners around the world are harvesting, head over to Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

Roots, both Edible and Incredible

How do you know you are getting a bit behind in garden chores? When the 2014 seed catalogs start arriving and you have not completed cleaning out the garden beds! I was enjoying the newly arrived Pinetree and High Mowing  catalogs when I realized I have not finished my chores with this year’s garden. We already had a garden work day but I spent more time helping put a wood chip border around our deer fence to protect the fragile plastic mesh deer fencing fabric from the town’s mowers than cleaning up my own plot.

 

We always recommend gardeners pull disease-prone plants like tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumbers and dispose of them in the trash, the task I had yet to finish in my own garden beds. So today I headed to the garden with a black plastic trash bag. My first discovery was a pleasant one. I had left some Golden Ball turnips in the ground after pulling the larger ones and they survived nicely. I now have a nice batch of turnips to use for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

 

Next I pulled all the dead solanaceous and cucurbit plants. The plants were dead brown stems, the leaves long blown away. The biggest distinguishing characteristic was the roots, and how easy or hard it was to pull the plant. Particularly interesting to me was to compare the root structures of the grafted tomato plants to the ungrafted control plant. I have already declared the grafted tomato experiment a failure, and I won’t be planting them next year. Looking at the root balls, you can see why. Below is a photo of the Juliet tomatoes. The ungrafted tomato is the one at the top.

 

 

Alright, maybe I should have removed the fabric from the grafted tomato, but roots are supposed to grow through it and actually did. Also notice the size of the stems. The ungrafted Juliet at the top was grown in a 4 inch pot by a neighbor and was a beautiful transplant with a thick, stocky stem flushed with red. The grafted tomato was a mail order plant and arrived as a small, spindly plant and was never going to compete effectively with my locally grown ungrafted plant. Next I pulled the Big Beef tomatoes, shown below.

 

 

Again, the ungrafted Big Beef is the plant on the top. The Big Beef grafted plant was a bit more successful than the pathetic Juliet grafted plant, but did not compare well to the ungrafted Big Beef. So much for the theory that the rootstock used for grafted tomatoes is far more vigorous and  produces huge root volumes. In my case, that clearly is not true, but there must be a reason. Commercial growers are huge consumers of grafted plants, so it must work in the right conditions. For the time being, I will sit out the grafting experiment and go with ungrafted plants next year.

Bustin’ Their Britches

 

My tomato and pepper plants are still huddling inside under the grow lights where it is warm. They are getting leggy and it is past time they go into the beds, but it is still  too cold. We had the rain they forecast last week, off and on, but even if it wasn’t raining it was grey and ugly. And cold. Saturday daytime temperatures were in the mid-40s all day, and 42F overnight. In New Hampshire and Vermont it snowed last night, heavy in some places! Down South of us they have been having cold weather and even occasional frosts, giving them a little taste of New England gardening. Europe is experiencing similar unseasonably cold weather.

 

I have had the plants outside when I could, when it is sunny with reasonable temperatures and no threats of hail storms. I just can’t see exposing my pepper and eggplant starts to 40F daytime temperatures if I can avoid it. I’m trying to avoid any stunted growth from cold temperatures, since both types of plants are real heat lovers. The tomatoes can take a bit more cold weather, so I am hoping I can get them planted next week, maybe even Monday. Later in the week daytime temperatures are supposed to be in the low 80s so maybe we are seeing a break in this weather. It’s really dependent on the jet stream, which has moved very far south and is sucking in cold air from Canada.

 

The grafted tomato experiment is also shaping up. The grafted plants were potted up into plastic cups and have recovered from their trip to the east coast from California. Unfortunately, they are kind of spindly plants and are starting to get leggy. And I have to keep the graft above soil level to prevent the scion from rooting and negating the disease resistance of the rootstock, so burying them deep is not an option. I acquired a Juliet plant from a neighbor, Jem Mix, who grows organic seedlings and had her annual plant sale Saturday. It is a really stocky, well grown and robust plant (shown below on the right) and is going to be real competition for the grafted plant (on the left). Is the grafted plant up to the challenge, and can it justify its $8 price tag? The Juliet variety is already a robust grower and pretty disease resistant, so will the grafted rootstock add anything?

 

 

 

With the acquisition of the Juliet yesterday, the tomato planting list for this year is now finalized and my precious 14 squares allocated to tomatoes are going to be planted with  the following varieties:

• Sun Gold cherry (2)
• Black Cherry (2)
• Gilbertie paste (1)
• Striped Roman paste (2)
• Juliet (2, 1 grafted)
• Big Beef (2, 1 grafted)
• Cherokee Purple (1 grafted)
• Pineapple (1)
• Green Zebra (1)

Originally I planned on two Gilbertie plants but I had germination problems with it and only one of the plants is really acceptable. The other is a runt and I decided not to give it a coveted spot in the garden. After all, I’m not running a plant hospital here, I’m tying to grow some tomatoes. This is my first year for Gilbertie, but NE gardeners on the Square Foot Gardening forum like it a lot. Seed is hard to find, got mine from High Mowing Seeds. It takes a long growing season to ripen these, with fruits that get seven inches long and weigh 10-12 ounces, so hopefully we have a good tomato summer.