On Growth And Gardens

They keep growing. When I’m not watching is when it happens the most and there are times when I actually hope to see no new height, no expansion into some deeper area of the garden. Day to day, it can be hard to see, but watch across a series of pictures and you will note the changes…

When did that happen? Is that my garden? It just looks like.. soil still in my mind.

For me the greatest time of the year is when the garden has barely begun. The days are getting warmer, trees are filling out, the frogs return at night and I see the stars again. Summer waits while spring shrinks. Plants aren’t plants yet.. they’re seeds or starts or a box on a piece of graph paper. What will happen this year?

The garden fills quickly then. Peas, broccoli, lettuce. Tomatoes are in, potatoes are sprouting. And still it’s about the potential of the space – I drew it all out in December and here it is happening precisely as I imagined. But I’d like to keep it young for a while because when the plants age, it means summer is passing. Just a few more perfect days please… more sun, more blue skies, more time with friends and family.

When vacation hits it means leaving the garden to grow a while without me. So. Blight. Welcome again to my peaking summer.

Vacation with my wife, our two sons, our best friends and their three kids is about learning that it’s amazing to watch the children. This is their vacation and I selfishly hope that they are deliberately storing every moment away… I remember when I was a kid.. we always vacationed with our best friends.. we had a blast.

Vacation is best viewed now at a small distance. Kyle and Devon bravely jumping from the dock, Kate, Seth and Sean slapping the water, Chris cooking, Jen playing, Julie (who made it all happen to begin with) making every thing warm and perfect.

I watch as Kyle builds a sand castle, his first with really wet sand. He is.. imagining something, his skin is lightly tanned. I follow the end of his foot, toes digging absently, up the line of his leg, past his waist, his arm is braced. His small shoulder blade pressing tightly through his skin. He is… tiny. Huge. So big.

Too big. Stop growing and let’s just imagine a little bit longer.

Filed under: Uncategorized , gardens, gardens and kids

Sunday Bloody Tomato Sunday

Gloomy and gray weather today. The same kind of weather that has killed half of my tomatoes!

If this were a cooking blog, I’d be writing about how I burned the sauce. But it’s a gardening blog, so I’m going to write about how I lost my crops. Curse you humidity! Curse you heavy rains! Curse you freakishly tall and heavy tomatoes! Curse you vacation!

No. No curse on vacation.

While I was away, the blight did indeed set in. Hard. Before I left I could see that it was coming, but I was hoping that we’d get a magical break of hot, dry weather. We didn’t.

In fact, what we got was more humid. And we got lots of rain. My tomatoes were so tall that even while the blight was working away at their lower halves, gravity was tugging their upper halves down, down, and more down.

Collapsing plants are one thing. But blight? Yikes.

The thing with early blight is that you can treat it with copper. It even says that it’s organic. But good lord! The warning label pretty much reads like:

Do not breathe the mixture. Do not look at the mixture. Do not apply while you are within 75 feet of the mixture. The fact that you are holding the bottle and reading this warning label means that you have less than three hours to live. Kiss your family goodbye and let them know that you have successfully applied the mixture and that the blight will be gone. Probably. But actually, probably not. Anyway, thanks for buying!

Given that there is fruit setting on my plants now, it just didn’t seem like a good idea to put that stuff on. Hard decisions followed. After propping many of the plants up (you can re-stake a branch that has bent… tomatoes are tough and can survive that) I had to take a step back and decide to sacrifice the few for the many.

Or actually, sacrifice the half for the other half! Of my roughly 16 tomatoes, 8 are gone. Here’s the mass grave. (For the faint of heart.. look away!)

I am most distressed that the Mother Russia plants, both of them, are gone. I was truly looking forward to them. I still have two very good looking brandywines. I’ve got one solid Roma and one that is likely to die. I’ve got Purple Cherokee and Old German and Pink Caspian. I will still have a fair amount.

But it’s just not what I was hoping for!

Ah well… next year I’m afraid I’m going to have to let the garden soil rest without any tomatoes. This is the second year in a row of blight and it’s probably not going away.

For now, I will enjoy my beans, peppers, the idea of potatoes, and my few remaining, healthy, happy tomatoes.

Filed under: tomatoes , blight, early blight, tomato blight

Step By Step Soaker Hose

I did finally do it.

Not as well as Garden Of Eatin. But I did do it finally.

My garden is only about 25 feet from the water spigot. Here’s what I did.

1. Bought a spigot divider so that I could run one normal hose and one soaker hose.
2. Bought a faucet extender thingy so that I could plant that in the garden and run the soaker hose from it.
3. Bought a fairly cheap hose, 50 feet, to run from the spigot divider, underground and then to my faucet extender.
4. Dug a quick trench from the main faucet all the way to the garden.
5. Buried the hose.
6. Attached the soaker hose to my garden faucet extender.
7. Strung the 75 foot soaker hose up and down my tomato rows.

Pretty simple! Only thing left to do is bury the soaker hose within the tomato rows just a bit.

Running the soaker hose is best accomplished with a timer. But I didn’t get one. Which means I will soon be leaving the soaker hose on for an entire week because I’ll forget!

Filed under: Uncategorized , soaker hose, step by step soaker hose

Purple Pole Beans

Rough garden day. Returned from vacation to lots of blight, lots of collapsed tomatoes, lots of mole tunnels leading right into my potatoes, lots of new bugs.

More on the blight later.

But as I was hitting peak discouragement, I noticed these beautiful beans. Picked them. We ate them with dinner. More beans. Good for the gardening spirit.

Filed under: beans , pole beans

Potato PITA

Not a recipe folks. Potato PITA is about my potatoes and what a pain in the backside they are!

A few of the plants have died. Mostly from various kinds of blunt force trauma. When hilling these things, soil works best because it provides room for the potato tubers to form and it provides the best support for the growing plants.

I use straw because it’s easier. Trouble is, I just didn’t have quite enough on there and with all of the rain and wind, many of the plants got smashed down hard. I’ve actually staked some of them up and many are leaning just on one another for support. But between the several resuscitations, the propping, smashing, pulling, staking, poking, etc. a few of the plants have given up.

They probably have some early (new) potatoes going and I’ll pull them up.

I still have 80% of the crop going. Since most of them have flowers, I know that potato life is happening. Once the tops die down a couple of months from now, I’ll still have lots of nice potatoes to eat. Except… now I smell a rat! Or actually a mole. Mole hills all over my lawn now and three nice feeding tunnels that go right to the garden and right into the potatoes. Time to urge my cat to do some mole hunting!

Potato flower

Filed under: Uncategorized

Beans beans, the beautiful fruit!

Purple Trionfo

Part of the reason to plant pole beans (aside from their long-term, prolific yields!) is how stinkin’ pretty they are.

Pole beans usually lag bush beans by a 1 – 3 weeks for production. My bush beans have been giving for about 2 weeks now and the pole beans are showing signs of serious life.

Flowers. Pretty pinky, purply ones.

Pretty soon the whole teepee will be teeming with them. I’ve got borlotto (cranberry), kentucky wonder, and purple trionfo. The vines are hearty, adventurous (tentacling around random garden stakes, bush beans, the cat.. whatever they can latch onto) and really, really pretty.

Filed under: beans, vegetable garden , pole bean flowers, pole beans, pole vs. bush beans

What To Do With Blooming Tomatoes?

The tomatoes are just about 6 weeks in the garden and they are… large. Generally speaking, an indeterminate tomato doubles in size each week early in its cycle, then they pretty much keep growing until you or the frost tells them to stop. This is certainly the fastest I’ve seen my tomato plants become gargantuan.

Early on in their lives (in some cases before transplanting) they began blossoming. I did what most gardeners do at that point – begrudgingly plucked the flowers. I wanted the plants to become established, secure their roots, throw out some leaves to catch some rays. The inner workings of vegetable plants change once flowers emerge. Reproduction becomes more of the singular focus (my own flowers emerged at about age 13!) and that means the plant system begins giving itself over to the fruit.

So, I snipped away those early flowers. It’s still a bit early, but… I’ve got not just blossoms, but several tomatoes growing

Roma

The romas, a much earlier determinate variety, on the front side of the garden are fruiting like crazy. No worries there. The little cage I used for this plant is probably insufficient, but I’ll just stake up stray vines. This plant’s brother is in a slightly different spot and is much more insufficiently caged. It’s producing, but I’m not banking on its long-term survival.

For the indeterminates.. yikes. Big freaking plants. German Johnson is like a very tall guy right now. A few blossoms and one plum sized fruit that is growing each day. Of the five Brandywines I’ve got, they all look very healthy with just a few blossoms each. One of them is already sporting several tomatoes ranging from acorn sized to.. bigger acorn sized, to maybe a raquetball.

Brandywine

Purple Cherokee has a dusting of blossoms and several frutis. I’ve got two Mother Russia and one is healthier than the other and has a few fruits going. The Trophy plants (2) and the Early Girl (1) and the Caspian Pink (1) are doing okay, but no fruit.

Purple Cherokee

The cherry tomato plant is a freaking monster – it’s got clusters of fruit all over it.

Cherry

At this point – because I am in the midst of the newly-typical Connecticut summer (hot and very humid, humid at night, fog/mist in the morning) and the extra whammy of limited sun, I am worried about fungal/bacterial diseases. Wet plants that stay wet breed ick. For most of these plants, I’ll pull off a few of the leaves and stems at the bottom of the plants. I’ll wait to make the determination, but certainly the lowest leaves that I haven’t already pruned can go. This will improve air circulation. Ick usually starts at the bottom of the plant and I’d prefer to not give it anything to latch onto yet.

Filed under: tomatoes , Tomato blossoms, tomato ripening

Flowers: Most Of The Time You Can’t Eat These Things

As a vegetable gardener I am frequently green (thank you I’ll be here all night) with envy.

The flower gardener bloggers get to post and write about pretty stuff. Just look at those sites! Man even my house smells better when I visit them! Beautiful pictures everyday. Flowers that I’ve never heard of (which actually is most flowers), flowers that look alien, flowers that look biologically human. Posts and pictures of bees, birds, stamens, pistils, petals, pollen, phototropism.

What do I get to write about? Mostly ugly stuff that you can eat. Now I know that you can eat many flowers (squash blossoms!) like nasturtiums, roses (especially the thorns), peanut butter, and the reclusive filet mignon flower, but really when we think about eating plants it’s pretty much vegetables.

But still.

Behold! These flower things! Look at the purple! And the other colors and the stuff that makes it flowery! And I grew this myself!

Sort of. We inherited this.. clematis I think. And since I don’t know what I’m doing with flowers, well I just yanked all the dead vines away last year. Thought I killed it by mistake. But, naturally, my well-honed plant instincts were dead on. Years of just yanking plants out of the dirt and snipping away twiggy looking crap turned out to be just the kind of education I needed for this particular kind of clematis – whatever kind that is.

It is spectacular. So many flowers. The thing looks pillowy, like I could lay down on it and settle softly into my own custom flowery memory foam (and my dainty figure would barely leave an indent).

It makes me appreciate nature even more.

Soon, I will eat it.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Good Bug, Bad Bug

My wife has an amazing ability to buy me great books.  I read a lot of different things and she’s found a way to match my bizarre interests in science and history to the perfect book choice.  Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries… she’s very thoughtful about it.

She usually includes a gardening book or two in the selections and for vacation she ordered Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser.  (Her blog is worth reading too.  She’s got a cool wire frame potato bin thing happening there that is likely to be the way I do potatoes next year.)

When I was a kid I had these cool animal cards.  The company sent out a set of 5 or so each month for a while and it came with a green, plastic container.  I loved organizing it, alphabetizing, and reviewing each animal.  I can still see the cool, freaky picture of the aye aye in my head!  And when I decided that the armadillo was my favorite animal in sixth grade, that card started me on the road to know-it-all armadilloness.

Good Bug, Bad Bug reminds me of those cards!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for pictures of my garden pests.  And this book is simply set up with great pictures of all of them, descriptions, organic treatments (if they exist) and how to spot the damage.  She’s also got a section on beneficial bugs with the same info and she describes how to attract them.

The book is small and easy to flip through.  Check it out… no more searching online for me..

Filed under: pests, reviews , good bug bad bug, jessica walliser

Angry Tomatoes Wait For Me To Leave

I’m pretty sure they saw the signs.

Lots of books…. hmmm. A list of booze to buy. I think we all see where this is going… yeah. Yep. Suitcases. And that crazy cloth carrier thing they put on top of the car. Yeah. This is it fellas! They’re going on vacation. Commence ripening!

We’re headed to New Hampshire for a week and the rascals in the garden know it! The tomatoes are thickening right before my eyes and I think there will be about 10 Cherokee Purples ripe by next Wednesday. And the bastard brandywines… 5 of them will probably be ready to go while we are 200 miles away.

I’ll teach them. I’m going to eat my own farm fresh veggies while away!

The tomatoes in New Hampshire are cuter anyway.

Filed under: tomatoes , tomatoes on vacation