Harvest Monday 3 August 2015

 

We will start this post off with not a beet photograph. Lots of squash this week, with the Romanesco now producing eight fruit per week to Dunja’s three.

 

 

 

Here is the requisite beet photograph. Just a few more left. I need to replant these and hope I get some for the fall.

 

 

The escarole is starting to bolt, so I harvested two heads. And I am still getting some lettuce. When I removed the bolting lettuce heads, I found smaller plants crowded underneath from inadequate thinning, which I left. They are now harvestable size, proving that laziness has some usefulness in gardening.

 

 

The endives are also ready to harvest. The inside of this head is nicely blanched, which makes it more tender and less bitter. The frilly leaves are really hard to clean , however. Lots of hiding spaces for slugs, earwigs, pill bugs, and just plain debris.

 

 

More squash and tomatoes.

 

 

Despite my problems with bean diseases, I am still harvesting plenty. This is several pounds and I picked a like quantity on Sunday which I did not photograph.

 

 

I am finally starting to get some peppers. On the left are three Hungarian Paprika, then an orange Yummy Belle, and three Jimmy Nardello. I also picked some (too) large Padron peppers, which did turn hot.

 

 

More tomatoes are starting to ripen.. On the left are two Opalka, one with some BER. The green shoulders on it are typical. The large orange tomato in the center is my first Sunkist, one of the smaller ones. It has a touch of anthracnose rot on the stem end so it is going to get cut up and used today. The two rose colored cherry tomatoes are the first Sweet Treats. I like their color.

 

 

After clearing out the bed of Super Star onions of all that had formed bulbs, I was left with these “onions” with very straight and thick stems. I showed these in a photo a few weeks ago and wondered how big the bulbs were going to be, given the diameter of the stems. Well, they are not forming bulbs. Last week it suddenly became obvious. These are not onions but leeks. Apparently Dixondale Farms mixed some leeks in with the bundle of Super Star onion plants. I am not upset, I can always use some more leeks.

 

 

Finally, this is a satellite view of my house and its so-called yard. This should explain why I can not garden at home and have to drive to the town’s community garden/allotment. The house is located in a stand of climax Eastern white pine on top of a pile of rocks forming a knob off the side of the Vaughan Hills. East is the lower right corner. The land slopes to the left down to the town road. Elevation is enough that I have driven home in the rain to find it turning to snow as I go up the driveway. The “soil” is several inches of forest duff on top of a clay-like mixture of rock powder and pebbles left by the glacier. My first “gardening” tools were a chain saw, pick ax, and my favorite, a heavy five-foot pry bar. Thank goodness for the community garden.

 

That’s what happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are doing, visit Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

July Tomato Tour

It is the end of July and the tomatoes are busy setting and ripening fruit.  I have already harvested a few of the smaller tomatoes, but the rest will have to wait until August. Since the plants are a lot more interesting with fruit hanging on them, here is a quick tour.

 

 

 

I have four Opalka plants, a Polish paste tomato I first saw at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens. Fruits range from big blocky fruits to long and skinny. Unfortunately, The skinnier fruits are highly susceptible to blossom end rot and I have removed a lot of them to conserve the plants’ resources.

 

 

The bottom tomato shows why it is useless to try to ripen the fruit, thinking you can just cut the end off. By the time the tomato is ripe, the rot usually affects the entire tomato.

Tomato Inventory 2015

This year I have 28 tomato plants, 14 each in the raised-bed and in-ground gardens. All but 5 of these were started by me from seeds this winter. There were ups and downs but I generally did a decent job this year starting my tomatoes from seed. In addition to the plants in my garden, I was able to give another 9-10 tomato plants to other gardeners in the community garden. What you wind up with in the spring is not always what you plan for in the winter. Each year you have to be satisfied with what you achieved and supplement it with purchases if necessary. What follows is an inventory of what is actually in soil and growing now. Just forget those garden planting schedules I made in February, they no longer matter.

 

The Raised Beds

Working counterclockwise around the raised beds.

 

 

Above  is Esterina, an F1 hybrid cherry tomato that I am growing in lieu of Sungold. I love Sungold but it has a terrible tendency to crack whenever it rains. Esterina is just as sweet and prolific and more crack resistant. I grew it last year and liked it, so this is the second year. I have 3 of these planted in the raised beds and gave away 2 of them. My seeds came from High Mowing but it is also carried by Territorial and William Dam in Canada.

Harvest Monday 6 October 2014

Last week I started the garden clean up process. I decided time to pull the bush beans because I need that bed for planting garlic. Turns out the beans are not ready to give up just yet. The Provider beans were kaput but I got a good picking from Jade which provided a meal for us that night. In addition I got an even bigger pile from the pole beans. The Musica beans were still cranking, although the cold nights are finally shutting them down. I got a few more Gold Marie beans but they are now finished and many of the pods have been damaged by some pest feeding on them. Surprisingly, the Violetto beans are putting on growth and flowering for a third time. If I just had a longer growing season, they would be a very productive bean.

 

 

I am puzzled by the pest that is feeding on the beans. I was expecting to find some green stink bugs, which like to drill into the pods, but so far have not found any. I did spot a couple of small, narrow black insects crawling around the Musica beans, which also have suffered some damage. Unfortunately, they had vanished by the time I fetched my camera. These things were not bug shaped nor beetle shaped. The body was sort of wasp shaped but with no apparent wings. The body was black with no apparent markings. They did not look like tarnished plant bugs. I have checked photos of bean pests online and have not found a match. I hope I can get a photo of them because I would like to know what I am dealing with.

 

 

Next up was pulling the tomato plants. I got a lot of green tomatoes for the effort and made a batch of refrigerator pickled green tomatoes. When pulling the tomatoes out of the raised beds, I had to be careful not to damage the peppers in the next row. Because of the loose, friable soil in the beds, the tomato roots like to roam the neighborhood and make themselves at home. Next year I have to reconsider what I put in the squares next  to the tomatoes. I may go back to planting shallower rooted plants like the onions in those squares.

 

 

The plant above is a Sunkist tomato from a raised bed. You can see the length of some of the roots. Most of the very longest roots seem to have grown from the top of the root ball at the base of the stem. This pretty well illustrates the advantage of planting the tomatoes deep enough to bury some of the stem. And of course, the beds are only 8 inches deep so going down is not an option.

 

 

Next I pulled the tomatoes that were planted in-ground in my extra garden plot. Those tomatoes did very well this year compared to the plants in the raised beds, and despite fairly poor soil. So I was curious to see what their root structures looked like. The two plants above are Brandywine and the root balls are probably about the same size as the Sunkist but without the really long roots. Apparently the roots found everything the plants needed in their own backyard and didn’t have to go roaming. At this point I realized I should have photographed the Sunkist and Brandywine root balls side by side, but the Sunkist was already buried deep in a trash bag of tomato plants and rotten tomatoes and I was not putting my hand in there.

 

 

The Carmen peppers have finally started to ripen. I got a large set of fruit on the two plants in the in-ground garden but they were taking their good old time ripening. How do you tell a pepper the clock is ticking and frost is on the way? I also picked some more Trinidad Spice peppers and have another five on the plant in various stages of ripening. 

 

 

I tried to harvest a single head of escarole from the August planting and wound up with two. Since I planted them farther apart than usual, they have kind of flopped on the ground so the leaves are entirely green. The first one I tried was kind of tough. I need to tie them up into heads so the center of the head blanches. Amazingly there was not a single spot of slug or earwig damage to these heads.

 

That’s what came from my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are harvesting from their gardens, check out Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday 18 August 2014

Last week, the weather was moderate with a lot of cloudy days that suggested rain, but it only rained significantly for one day. We got several inches that day but the garden was so dry that it was all absorbed. When I got back to the garden, a few things were a little overgrown. At this time of year  the beans and squash really need to be checked every day.

 

 

More beans. The purple ones are Trionfo Violetto. I froze a lot of those but have no more room in the freezer. A large amount of the beans were again donated to the food pantry.

 

 

Some of the heirloom tomatoes are starting to ripen. Above are a Brandywine and a Pineapple on the right. The heirloom tomato vines are loaded with clusters of very large tomatoes and show little signs of actually ripening. I am a little worried about the tomato stakes snapping under the load. That’s a problem I haven’t had in a long time.

 

 

The long peppers are Carmen, a sweet pepper that is turning out to be very productive. A few Sunkist orange tomatoes and a very green Cherokee Purple. My Cherokee Purple plant was loaded with large fruit like the one above when it fell over. The heavy rain saturated the soil and the pole wasn’t driven deep enough, so the plant toppled toppled over as the pole came out of the soggy ground.

 

 

A fully ripened Sunkist tomato sliced up. This is a meaty, low-acid tomato with good flavor. It is very productive and fairly disease resistant, a tomato I will be growing again.

 

 

More squash and a few Cherokee Purple tomatoes starting to color up (as well as crack, damn rain).

 

 

More beans.

 

 

The last Napa cabbage, considerably reduced in size after removing the slug-damaged outer leaves. This one was used for slaw. I used some of the previous cabbage and some radishes to make kimchee, which turned out OK. It is a little too salty and a tad too hot for my taste, but not bad.

 

That is what happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around the world are harvesting from their gardens, head over to Daphne’s Dandelions, our host for Harvest Monday.