2016 garden

Blue Berries tomatoes are ripening

 

Black Icicles are getting there too, plus the tallest one just topped the 7foot tall cages:

There’s at least two more that’ll definitely make the 7foot mark, and a couple more that may or may not.

 

Sugar Baby Watermelon:

 

Cantaloupe:

 

Melon Pear fruit:

Note-I didn’t realize till it was to late, but quite a few places recommend caging these plants, like tomatoes, and for much the same reason.  The weight of the fruit flattens the plants out.  Something to keep in mind if we decide to grow them again.

 

Paprika peppers:

 

I’ve pulled two zucchini out of the garden, and made a batch of zucchini bread, just cause.

Oh, and this is Friday’s cucumber harvest:

JUST Friday’s harvest.  Of course I’ve had at least a few almost every day for the last week-plus, which I’ve mostly been eating, cause these are seriously good eating cukes.  So I made two quarts of refrigerator pickles.  Which used up less than half of Friday’s harvest.  Gave away 8 or so to a friend.  Harvested another pile at least that big on Sunday.  Gave away another handful to a neighbor.  Gave away the whole pile to a former co-worker who planned to do a serious batch of pickles.  And between yesterday and today (Tuesday) I refilled the strainer with cucumbers.  I think my cucumber plants are happy.  Time to play around with a wider variety of pickles I think.

 

My four rain barrels have come in handy this summer.  I keep saying that I know, but its so true.  Our water bill would be SO HIGHER this summer without them.  I’m planning on how to add 4 more.  It won’t happen this year, or likely next year unless I’m lucky, but it will happen.

My mystery squash plant is thriving:

I originally assume the vine was cantaloupe, but it clearly isn’t.  The giant leaves look like zucchini leaves, but the zucchini variety I grow doesn’t vine like this clearly is.  The squash itself is marked much like the baby pumpkins (well, the Long Pie Pumpkins I grow anyway), and that would explain the vining habit.  But the insanely quick growth (it was still a baby with bloom attached when I took a picture on the 26th, and is now a good foot long) is more zucchini style.  The Long Pie Pumpkins grow quickly, but not THAT quickly.  So do I treat it like a zucchini?  Or like a pumpkin?  I’m kinda tempted to let it keep growing and see what happens……

For comparison, a zucchini (which I’ll be picking this week, its a good size for it):

And a baby pumpkin:

 

Anyway, the rest of the garden.

The Melon Pears are THRIVING.  And to think I was worried about them.  There’re even baby fruit forming!  And yes, another mystery squash, this one looks straight forward Long Pie Pumpkin though.

 

Tomatoes: it turns out the Black Icicle Tomatoes may have had a magnesium deficiency.  They’ve been awfully pale and droopy in comparison to the rest of the tomatoes.   I had a couple people try to assure me that paste tomatoes are always “kinda droopy”, but they just didn’t look right.  After doing some digging around the internet I mixed up a couple gallons of water with some epsom salts and sprayed down the leaves and drenched the soil with it.  About a week and a half later the plants are much more normally colored and far less droopy.  In addition, I was worried that they had blight, they had almost all the symptoms (and so do several other tomato plants), and now almost all those symptoms (on the Black Icicles) are gone.  I’m still going to treat the entire garden with Actinovate, just to be safe (cause I don’t have the space to do proper rotations and I refuse to stop growing tomatoes), but I’m also going to treat all the tomato tires with epsom salts too (and seriously considering doing the entire garden).  A magnesium deficiency wouldn’t be a huge surprise in retrospect.  I’ll have to see if I can arrange some soil testing either this fall or next spring.

Black Icicle tomatoes before epsom salt treatments (and one a few days after treatment):

And yesterday:

The difference in color is NOT a trick of the light, I promise!  In addition the tallest plants are pushing 6ft tall now!

All of the tomato plants have baby fruit on them, well, except for the volunteer plants that appeared in two tires, but thats not a surprise since they didn’t get the headstart the rest did.  For that matter, pretty much everything has baby fruit on it!  Possible exception is the habaneros, but they do that to me every year, get thinking I’m not going to get anything and then POOF, hot peppers!

I’ve picked enough cucumbers to do up a good sized batch of refrigerator pickles.  Putting them on a trellis DOES make a difference in how easy it is to find and pick fruit.  But I swear the plants are VERY HAPPY being allowed to sprawl on the ground:

Or maybe its just the insane summer weather this year, donno…..

 

The weather has been insane.  Hot.  Not quite record breaking, but close on more than one occasion.  Dry too, rain barrels are coming in handy.  Then we get a “cold” snap, which drops us to normal seasonal weather for a couple days, then back to hot.

End result, the garden is GROWING FAST.  Since I tend to pick for short season, cool weather tolerant, varieties we’ll have to see how this works in the long run, but most of the plants are growing huge.

Buena Mulata Peppers

 

Black Icicle tomatoes, those plants are pushing 4feet tall now

Volunteer SOMETHING growing in one of the Black Plum Tomato tires.  I was originally figuring cantaloupe, but looking at those leaves I’m wondering if they’re a hybrid with something, time will tell I guess!

Potatoes

Miniature White Cucumbers, last two years I put them on a trellis, this year I decided to just let them spread and see if it makes a difference.  So far they’re quite happy as they are.

Sugar Snap Peas, I grew a bushing variety this year, they might be smaller plants, but so far I’ve gotten far more peas off of them!

Onions and lettuce.  This is one my bed failure, that white tube is supposed to allow me to feed water into the sub-layer of gravel, and on this one container it has somehow gotten blocked and water isn’t feeding right.  So I’m going to have to dig up the container and figure out what happened.

Blue Berry Tomatoes.  According to Bakers Creek, where I bought these seeds, this variety came from Wild Boar Farms, not the European GMO variety.  I’m not rabid anti-GMO, but I do like growing different things than what I can get in the stores!

Long Pie Pumpkins

Cantaloupe

Jalapenos

White CHerry tomatoes

Tzimbalo Melon Pear, and volunteer something…..

In addition I didn’t get photos of the watermelons, zucchini, okra, sunflowers, carrots, Hot Wax peppers, paprika peppers, habenaro peppers……

Rain barrels are full, and I had to rush out and put in the overflow drains (cause I’d been lazy and not done them) to divert the extra water away the way I wanted.  For proof of concept I bought a 50ft soaker hose, put it on the end of a 25ft regular hose, and wove it around the garden for as far as it would go, and there was enough water pressure from the barrels to push water all the way to the end of it.  I’ll need more length for the rest of the garden, and it’ll take some fiddling to make sure that everything is getting appropriately watered, but as proof of concept, I’ll take it!

For reference, all the tomato cages are made out of 3ft tall welded wire.

These are the white cherry tomatoes

 

Blue Berry Tomatoes

 

Black Plum Tomatoes

 

Black Icicle Tomatoes.  No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, yes, they are that tall.

 

Melon Pear.  Not sure these are thriving, but they aren’t dying either, so we’ll see.

 

My Variegated Japanese Willow bush.  I planted this as a little 2ft tall stick a couple years ago, now its taller and wider than my Husband.  I need to give it a quick trim and even it out, but its survived and thrived through two screwy winters.  The only reason I’ve not planted a ton more of them is cause I’d really prefer either flowering or native or both.

 

The darkest of my Lupines.  I’ll have to remember to save the seeds from it this year and spread them around.

 

The Hibiscus have sprouted, and are infact a couple inches tall already, no pictures, I forgot.  And we’re going to have a bumper crop of strawberries this year.

Potatoes……last time I tried potatoes despite my attempt at hilling them they only produced more potatoes around the base.  Doing some research it turns out that many short season potatoes will do that.  So I got longer season ones this year…..but do I keep hilling?  I mean sure, I’ve seen those “grow 100lbs of potatoes in 4 square feet) things, that have you hilling and hilling and hilling.  But “conventional wisdom” says hill twice and after that just do a layer of mulch or straw and thats it.  I have enough of the garden bed kit to put at least two more layers on the bed, so in theory I could just keep going up……

I started planting out my insane tomato seedlings today.

These are the Black Icicle Tomatoes.  They look leggy, but the stalks are nice and thick, they almost don’t need support.  And none of the other seedlings look leggy.  Just how tall are these going to get??

 

White CHerry Tomatoes

 

Blue Berries Tomatoes

I’ll plant out the Black Plums this weekend hopefully, I gotta construct more cages first.

 

German Butterball Potatoes are doing nicely

 

Notice the one big carrot on the right?  Thats the one that survived the winter

 

Lettuce, and onions (oops, and radishes, how did I forget the radishes??)

 

Sugar Snap Peas