Or, I need the advice of someone who has been doing this gardening thing for more than 3 months. Anyone out there?
I haven't been blogging nearly as much about the garden as I intended, but as a quick update, we are eating things from it! Mainly zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes. Potatoes are ready to come out of the ground, so I'll work on that this weekend.
When this gardening adventure began, we had two neighbors tell us to watch out for the birds eating our tomatoes. Um...what? I don't know why, but I didn't believe them. And neither did the guy at the greenhouse who sold us the tomato plants. Take a look at our poor little tomatoes:
They've only starting eating the lowest ones closest to the ground, so hopefully the highest tomatoes will survive? Lesson learned - next year we will just have to be careful and protect them with netting.
This is where I really need some tomato advice. What in the world is this??
This is happening to both the Big Boy and Roma tomatoes, both ripe and unripe. Is there something wrong with the soil? Did I not water them right? Some tomatoes are still doing fine so I have no explanation for this.
In pepper news, does anyone have a good recipe for hot banana peppers? Because I have a million that I don't want to take off the plants yet because I'm clueless. I can put them on pizza, and make salsa. But without the nice tomatoes I was hoping for, I don't think salsa is coming anytime soon.
This was quite a surprise when I went out to the garden yesterday - the first pumpkin! The pumpkin vines have completely taken over the garden, but with the help of a trellis we built a few weeks ago they are growing up now instead of on the ground.
Other lessons learned:
- Don't plant so many cucumbers. I really don't love them myself, and Michael doesn't eat them...no idea what I was thinking but there are a lot ready to be picked.
- Don't plant lettuce next year. Or spinach...or any greens for that matter. With this heat and humidity I had a very small timeframe where I could harvest them. When the humidity spiked they bolted up to about 3 feet tall...yuck.
5 comments:
Disclaimer: I am NOT an expert.
Tomatoes look like blossom end rot. We get it occasionally if we over-water ours. Here's local info for you: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/hil-28-d.html. Take the bad ones off so the plant doesn't keep trying to grow/ripen them. You have plenty more time for your tomato plants to recover. Go get some netting!
For the spinach/lettuce problem, next year try spacing out your plantings. Plant a few seeds one week, a few more the next, etc. and start them super early (like maybe February/March where you are) because they like the cool/cold weather. Spinach is very hardy. Be done with greens by the time you plant your regular summer veggies, and then if you want more, do a second planting in the fall. There is nothing better than a salad made from greens just snipped out of your garden.
Do you guys eat pickles? I had some AMAZING homemade dill pickles from a Canadian bakery in Mexico. There were a few stalks of dill in the jar, some white onions, some garlic cloves, and cucumber spears. I don't know what was in the brine. Addictive. And amazing sweet/tangy bread and butter pickles from a guy who makes them in San Pancho. I'm looking for a recipe.
Our neighbors hack their pumpkin vine back a few times each season to keep it from wasting energy on more vine and instead to put more energy into the pumpkins. I don't know whether it works, but maybe try that earlier next season.
You should try some perennial grapes on your trellis. Or maybe that would be too much of a party for the birds. And find some strawberry plants, try those, maybe around the border of the garden. They take a few years to start producing much, but they are worth the time invested.
I'm totally a garden hacker, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. :)
By: Hillary on June 23, 2010 at 9:40 PM
Here's a good blossom end rot explanation.
http://www.veggiegardeningtips.com/tomato-blossom-end-rot/
By: Hillary on June 23, 2010 at 9:43 PM
All the bad tomatoes have now been taken off the plant so I'm hoping we can still get some good ones. Maybe netting them will be a task for this weekend.
Maybe I should plant some spinach this fall when it cools down. I am going to plant garlic in the fall, so I might as well have spinach out there too.
Yes, pickles are delicious (I think so at least), but I grew the wrong kind of cucumbers! I got muncher cucumbers, not pickling cucumbers. Another lesson learned for next year.
Thanks for the info on blossom end rot!
By: Liz on June 24, 2010 at 9:15 AM
Make pickles with your cucumbers :) I don't really know how - but sounds like a good idea!
By: Jilian on June 26, 2010 at 10:46 AM
You should still be able to make pickles with the cucumbers. Jason and I did a couple of years back and they were quite good, ask him if he still has a recipe.
Alternatively, give me your cucumbers :).
By: Jacob on July 10, 2010 at 5:00 PM
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