garden start (pictures)
Someone on my previous post mentioned pictures, so I'll go ahead and record the starting state of the garden.
( photos )
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this year's garden
This year I am attempting to grow (in containers):
- Roma tomatoes
- slicing cucumbers (it was labelled as a "bush" and good for containers)
- red bell peppers
- orange "lunchbox" pepper
- basil
- chives
- mint
I have a few more smaller pots, should I come across or think of anything else I want. Last year I had lots of herbs, and found that aside from basil I wasn't keeping up with them fresh and so dried a lot. I want more vegetables anyway, but many of them require more space than a container can provide.
I hope that whatever was eating my cherry tomatoes last year is not as fond of Roma.
ugly CSA week 7
Fruit is good, but I do hope the balance shifts a little more toward the vegetable end of the spectrum next week! (For this purpose, we can count tomatoes as vegetables.)
- 3 small and 3 medium Bartlet pears
- 5 Gala apples
- 3 nectarines (not yet ripe)
- 1 large tomato
- 2 medium green peppers (here's hoping they'll ripen)
- 1 head of romaine lettuce
Weight: about five pounds.
I also harvested my second red pepper tonight. (It was delicious in a stir-fry.) There are eight more full-grown ones on the plant in various stages in the journey from green to red. I lost one in a storm. For a long time it's looked like that was going to be it -- 11 peppers -- but in the last few days some new ones have started. I count seven, and there might be an eighth in a hard-to-see place. They're in the rapid-growth phase, so it should become clear soon. Nice -- a second round!
aftermath
Shabbat afternoon there was a brief but fierce storm here. I don't know about other parts of the city, but from my house, it was about three minutes of heavy wind and downpour and otherwise a typical summer rain. It was enough to knock our power out for the afternoon and evening, which was disruptive. Also, I think I was about to turn around that game of Through the Ages when continuing became impossible. We got power back just as we were going to bed; this morning Internet was still out, but we were able to get that resolved in under an hour on the phone with Verizon, which is above par. And, fortunately, we didn't lose any food -- went out for ice as soon as Shabbat was over and the meat in the freezer was still solid when I opened it to add the ice.
The garden, on the other hand... I have a large cherry-tomato plant in a large pot; with all the dirt, it's not trivial to move. It was sprawled across the patio. (I didn't think to get a picture before cleaning up.) That pot had been in front of a trellis that I'd been training the plant to climb, but once wrenched free, it wasn't going back. I had to fall back to an, um, "engineering" solution. I hope this works; the plant can't stand free any more even with the cage, so I couldn't just leave it on the patio away from the trellis.
I also lost a pepper. I have no idea if it'll ripen after being disconnected, but green peppers are foul so I'm not going to eat it as-is. The plant is supposed to produce sweet red peppers.
In case you're wondering, the cilantro was pretty much done before the storm finished it off, and the attempts to grow a second one from seed didn't work. So that's what the two empty pots are about; just waiting for them to dry out before putting them away.
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bounty
A week before Memorial Day -- so, a bit over two weeks ago -- I bought some seedlings and put them into pots.
Tonight, I changed dinner plans because holy smokes some of that needed to be harvested. I made a vegetarian larb for the first time, because one of the over-achievers was Thai basil, which I got for the first time this year to see how that would go. Didn't expect it to outpace my regular Italian basil!
Pictures behind the cut: ( Read more... )
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how it started / how it's going
Remember this tomato plant from the end of May, when I thought the cage was overkill but they didn't have the next size down?
Yeah. About that...
The actual tomato harvest so far has been five cherry tomatoes. I checked last year's pictures; this is definitely later. There are dozens of green ones on the plant, so I assume I'll have ripe tomatoes eventually.
The herbs are mostly doing well, except the cilantro and dill which are sad. Maybe they wanted bigger pots? That rosemary and basil, though... that's after a recent pruning!
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vague guidance
I planted sweet banana peppers for the first time this year (one plant). The wisdom of the Internet (TM) says to harvest them when they're yellow. Some say not until they're turning red, but that seems to be about hot banana peppers, not sweet.
"Harvest when they're yellow" -- that sounds so straightforward. Nobody seems to be more specific. Bright yellow? Yellow with no hint of green? Mostly yellow? So yellow you can see the orange coming in? Is there a second measure I can use to disambiguate, maybe something about how it feels?
The oldest of these (the large one in the center) is more yellow than green but isn't boldly yellow, so I assume I should wait.
(Meanwhile, the cherry tomatoes that have been on their plant for a couple weeks are still green. This feels late, but it's probably not the same variety as last year. Labeling was off last year so I don't really know what I had.)
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they sure grow up quickly
These pictures are from Sunday:
I've harvested some herbs since then. They're producing more quickly than I can use them fresh, but I know from last year's basil that if you don't prune you get spindly plants, so some drying is happening. I guess I only needed one rosemary plant after all. (You might be tempted to say that about basil too, but yum, basil!)
This is the tomato plant again today, two days later -- first small green tomatoes forming!
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garden 2021
Last year's container garden was reasonably successful, so I decided to try again this year. I'd wanted to grow more vegetables, but didn't find container-suitable ones for the most part. If I find cucumbers that can grow in a pot I'm still up for adding that; I'd need to get another pot but I have potting soil left over so I'm good there.
This year's seedlings are: one cherry tomato (down from two last year, but with better planning for growth from the beginning), one banana pepper, two basil (larger pots than last year), two rosemary (in retrospect probably only needed one), and one each of oregano, cilantro, dill, and mint. The mint is in the substandard pot because my understanding is that mint will eek out a life in a mere patch of dirt and then try to take over the world from there. So I figure it can handle the not-as-good drainage in that pot -- maybe it'll see it as a challenge! -- and if not, I'm out three bucks. I've already made back the cost of the cilantro, basil, and dill seedlings (though not their potting soil), compared to grocery-store prices for little plastic containers of fresh(ish) herbs.
( pictures )
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harvest
The temperature tonight is supposed to be below freezing, so today I did a final harvest. There are a few small green tomatoes that would need rather a while to grow and then ripen and I don't think I can keep the plant warm enough for long enough, so I picked everything that was larger even though it was still green, and I'll see if they ripen indoors. I've picked tomatoes before when they were orange but not fully red (to beat the critters to them), and I've had the occasional green one ripen on the windowsill. Today's are in a brown paper bag with a sacrificial apple. Even if I lose these last couple dozen, I had a pretty good bounty for the year, as best I can tell having never done this before.
The last of the rosemary and basil are currently drying. I had two different rosemary plants -- no idea what the difference was, but one is lighter than the other and they smell a little different. I decided to oven-dry one and hang-dry the other, to see how the methods compare. It's not true science because there's a second variable; I didn't split each variety into two groups. So I won't really know if any differences are due to the type or the method, but oh well. The main goal is to get dried herbs.
The lunchbox peppers were a disappointment. The peppers I got were nice, but I only got a total of 15 between the two plants. I will probably skip those next year and use the pots for something else.
I think next year I want to add some oregano.
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garden thoughts
This year I tried my hand at a little container gardening. I have nine pots: two cherry tomato, two lunchbox pepper, two rosemary (different varieties but I don't know which), and three basil. I'm enjoying having truly fresh food available (harvesting herbs as you prepare dinner is great). I'm not sure what yield I should be getting and some of it's been surprising. I've identified some things I did wrong.
The tomatoes got off to a good start, and fresh cherry tomatoes taste great! When they were at peak in July I was picking 8-10 per day, and one day I picked 22.
Then some local critter(s) took an interest. I don't know what's eating my tomatoes, but one day I had a bunch that were almost ready, decided to wait one more day to pick them, and the next day they were gone. I found the half-eaten corpse of one on the ground. They even ate some of the green ones! There seems to be another round -- a bunch of small green ones showed up -- and I've started picking them when full-sized but still green and letting them ripen on my windowsill.
Wise people of the Internet: what do I do to prevent this next year? I'd like to have fresh cherry tomatoes again next year.
The peppers have also been doing well as far as I can tell, but I expected to get more peppers from them. The first harvest yielded 8 or 9 peppers between the two plants, and there are currently 8 ripening on the plants. Is that what I should have gotten, or are my plants holding out on me?
The basil is tasty and has been put to good use. Over the course of the summer, new leaves have gotten smaller -- skinnier. Early on the leaves were big, dark green, and lush-looking; now they're a lighter green and longer and skinnier. Am I, perhaps, not pruning aggressively enough, so there's more competition on the plant for the same resources? "Resources", in this case, being the potting soil I started them with and a steady diet of water in a "self-watering" pot, meaning you fill a reservoir and the plant takes what it needs, or so the theory goes. I haven't done anything else to the soil.
The rosemary is also tasty. I haven't noticed any particular changes there over the course of the summer.
This year I started almost everything in pots that were too small for the final plant size. Next year I'll know: put that tiny cherry tomato plant in the 16" pot from the start, etc. (I only have one huge pot; the others are 10", 8", or 6".)
Next year I want to add oregano, and cilantro if it grows here. In principle I'd like to add vegetables too but I'm pretty committed to this "pots, not ground" idea, and I don't know what works in that context. I mean, I love butternut squash and its kin, but can you grow it in a pot?
In the spring my reason for wanting pots was easier access (I can lift a pot up onto a table to plant it and pots on the steps are easier to tend). As the season progressed I realized there's another reason: I can move pots to chase the sun. The spots that got 6+ hours of sun per day in May do not do so now, but other spots have opened up some. A core problem is that I don't have a lot of space on the property that gets full sun (and what does get it is paved anyway, it turns out). I'm not interested in approaches that involve grow-lights and indoor gardens; I want everything to stay outside (after we're past frost threats). So, pots that I occasionally have to carry across the patio is what I'm working with.
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garden report
I didn't take pictures today. The garden looks much like it did last week: there are still green tomatoes and young green peppers. The ones that were there last week are bigger; there are some new small tomatoes and two tiny new peppers. I imagine I'm a couple weeks away from harvesting any of that (and that's assuming the tomato thief lets me).
The basil plants have been producing leaves that are thinner and less lush than they were at the beginning of the season. Perhaps harvesting basil helps the plant (pruning) and isn't just for when I want to eat it, so today I harvested a bunch and made pesto. I understand that one can freeze basil, but I've not had much success with that in the past. I might try again. I might also dry some.
The rosemary got a slow start but is doing well now. I've been using it fresh too but might end up drying some. It doesn't look like the plant cares whether I cut some off or leave it alone, so I think I can do that toward the end of the season.
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garden thief!
On Tuesday I hit peak tomato, harvesting 22 (!) cherry tomatoes. There were several more that were almost ripe that I expected to pick the next day.
But the next day they were gone, all of them. I found the half-eaten carcass of one green tomato on the ground. I couldn't tell what ate it. I wonder if it was the rabbit I saw when I went out Tuesday evening to harvest some basil.
Both plants have some small green tomatoes, so I guess a second wave is coming after all. (I had come to the conclusion that one of them was not going to.) Some of the peppers are ready, some more almost ready, and some much younger and still green. I have no idea what the seasonal yield is supposed to be on these pepper plants; I was expecting a little more activity, but maybe they're a later-season thing.
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weekly garden report
Last Sunday I noted that the peppers were still green but looked like they were starting to turn yellow. By around Tuesday we had clear signs of yellow, and I thought I knew what kind of pepper plants I had. (These are "lunchbox peppers", which come in any of yellow, orange, or red; any given plant produces one color.)
Ha ha no, that was just stage one. The peppers that have developed color are all solidly orange now. I don't know if this is, in turn, a step on the way to red, or if orange is their final color. I'm also not sure when I'm supposed to pick them.
For the past couple months these plants have been showing four peppers each, and I've been wondering if I was going to all this trouble for eight peppers. Finally some small green ones have appeared farther up on the plants. I don't know what the seasonal yield is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, I've been picking 5-10 cherry tomatoes a day. The plant on the left doesn't have any more green ones, while the one on the right is continuing to make those. These are supposed to be "tidy treats", which are supposed to be indeterminates, which I understand to mean "makes fruit all summer". But these are also clearly different varieties despite the labeling, so perhaps I've now identified which of the two plants is the variety I ordered. The one on the left, whatever it is, started producing earlier, by maybe a week or a week and a half. It also has the smaller pot. (It was, originally, the larger of the two plants originally sharing a pot, before I realized just how much room cherry tomatoes would need.)
( pictures )
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Entry tags:
tomatoes
These aren't all the cherry tomatoes I've harvested; some went into salads earlier this week. Some of these went into a tomato-basil topping for fish tonight.
( Read more... )
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weekly garden report: tomato progress
There have been lots of green cherry tomatoes for a while. Friday I saw the first signs of other colors, and today a couple of them are actually red. I'm not sure when to pick them; they still feel pretty firm and it looks like they could gain more color yet, but I'll keep an eye on them.
I also added a couple more stakes because...tomatoes. This has been educational.
I have actually harvested basil several times, not that you can probably tell from the growth here. Next year I hope to do better on "bushy rather than tall". Pepper count remains the same and they remain green. I understand that they will turn red, orange, or yellow on the plant and that each plant produces peppers of one unknown-to-me color.
If I do more than one tomato plant next year, I'm definitely getting another big pot like the one on the right (which came from Home Depot via curbside pickup). That was the smaller of the two plants when I transplanted it. (While it would have made sense to put the larger plant in the larger pot, I was also concerned about trauma from transplanting, so I risked the smaller one.)
Two weeks ago today, one green tomato fell off of one of those plants (the one on the left). I figured I had nothing to lose by leaving it on my counter to see if it would ripen (no idea whether it would), and since then it's been joined by a few others. The others are green, but this greeted me this morning:
Entry tags:
weekly garden report
There are a lot more small green cherry tomatoes. The peppers are bigger and there are a couple new ones starting.
( pictures )
Entry tags:
weekly garden report
Each pepper plant has three peppers (even though one plant is much larger than the other). The peppers are still green and have grown quite a bit since last week. (The peppers are in the white pot and in the blue pot that is not on a step. I've been moving things around a bit to try to optimize everything's sunlight.)
All of the cherry tomatoes are still green and there are more small ones. I cannot tell if I have aphids.
I tried using some fresh basil on pizza the other day. How should I have done that differently?
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sooner than expected
I was not expecting this quite yet:
Or this:
I wonder how long it will take to get from that to ripe cherry tomatoes and miniature peppers. We'll see!
(Yes that is a crossbow bolt (and yes I used long bolts when I shot). My first try at tomato stakes got me something that's way too big. I'm waiting for try #2 to arrive.)
Here are the others, as a comparison to last week.
I moved the smaller pepper into a larger pot since it wasn't doing as well as its sibling, and I then moved one of the two basil plants sharing a pot into the vacated pot. I'm done moving things; whatever happens happens.
That rosemary in the red pot on the top step does not seem to be thriving. It's not failing; it's just not growing, near as I can tell. It's not as good a pot as the others. The pot and the plant both came from Home Depot. If it doesn't grow, oh well -- the rosemary it already has would cost more as produce in the store than the plant, pot, and soil did. The smaller rosemary (in the plum-colored pot) seems to be doing better.