Year in Review

The year is certainly not over, but the gardening is! Here's everything I managed to pull out of the garden this year (and managed to take a picture of), Instagram-style!

Potato Time

After carefully planting, hilling, and weeding potatoes all summer, finally it's time to reap the rewards. Here are a few of the Red Pontiac and Kennebecs I dug today. They do not get washed; I just spread them out on cardboard box tops and store them in the pantry. It's cool and dark enough there for the skins to toughen up a little, and then they can be used for baking, mashing, whatever.

The pile here comes from about five plants total; I planted a dozen of each variety. The rest of the potatoes will stay in the ground a little longer, though I need to remember to dig the rest before it gets too cold!

Lonely Pumpkins

Only four big pumpkins in my pumpkin patch, but they are beauties! Here is the one I've got my eye on for a jack-o-lantern.

You can see black landscape fabric and brick pavers on the ground; that's what I used to keep down the weeds in my pumpkin and melon section. It's a nice, relatively easy solution, but it also means the vines aren't able to re-root in the surrounding soil as they grow. Next year I'll try it without the landscape material and see how it goes.

Picking Peppers

I have 30 plants full of Aji Cristal peppers. Holy pepper overload! So I've been picking them and wondering what to do with them... a lot will be frozen and turned into jam this fall once things slow down.

To give you an idea of just how many peppers I am talking about... I picked every single pepper off just two plants, and filled my trug to overflowing!

Five Tomatoes to Grow

Five varieties of tomatoes were planted in my garden this year. Clockwise from the biggest one, they are: Pink Brandywine (indeterminate), Mountain Fresh (determinate), Amish paste (indeterminate), Tommy Toe (indeterminate), and Bellstar (determinate).

Without compare, the Amish paste tomatoes were my favorite. They are incredibly bountiful and had almost no disease or pest problems, aside from a few cases of blossom-end rot. Being a meaty tomato, they made great tomato sauce, but they are heavenly in bruschetta and salsa, sliced up on sandwiches, or salted and eaten by themselves.

Tommy Toes were an easy second: large and flavorful cherry tomatoes. I only had two of these planted and they were plentiful. I'm sure there would have been even more, had I gotten them in the ground earlier and staked them higher.

Pink Brandywines were tasty, but they seemed to be the vine of choice for the hornworms and other pests. They all looked great when green (and made great fried green tomatoes) but most had some kind of decay or bug problem by the time they were ripe. I only harvested about a dozen of these tomatoes in total. The vines haven't been killed off by frost or anything yet, but I don't expect much in the later season.

Mountain Fresh and Bellstar both grew fine and had lots of fruit, but I think I got them planted in the ground too late. I was able to use some of the Bellstars in sauce and salads. The Mountain Fresh ones are nice, firm, round tomatoes, exactly what you expect a typical tomato to be, and they were tasty. But determinate tomatoes is that all their fruit ripens within the span of a couple weeks. Indeterminate varieties keep bearing fruit as long as they keep growing - even now some of the Pink Brandywine plants are blossoming. They require a bit more attention since they grow much taller and, ideally, should be pruned as they go, but the benefit of having fresh tomatoes for a prolonged period of time makes them the better choice for me.

Bountiful Harvest

September arrived with an overflowing garden! I spend as much time harvesting as I did on some earlier days of tending the young plants. And it is worth it... behold:

Patty pan squash, yellow and purple string beans, cucumbers, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and hot peppers.

Moving into Harvest Time

As August comes to an end, I know there may be only a few weeks until frost, so I'm enjoying the fruits of my labor.

Here's my colorful harvest of tomatoes, summer squash, zucchini, patty pan squash, cucumbers, and a few mini red bell peppers.

Life is a Bowl of Cherry Tomatoes

Yum! Cherry tomatoes are plentiful and tasty. This variety is Tommy Toe, and they are big enough to quarter in salads... though they don't always make it to the salads. Lots don't even make it out of the garden before I pop them into my mouth.

The trellis they are growing on is a variation of the Florida weave, which has worked really well to support them as they continue growing taller and taller through the summer.

Vine Ripening

Pumpkins and melons are shaping up and filling out, becoming the beauties I knew they'd be when I first planted their seeds in the garden.

This shy Hercules pumpkin will be a star at the end of October when I turn him into a jack-o-lantern. Still growing even as he turns orange!

This petite watermelon has yellow flesh. Not sure how sweet it will be compared to the typical red-flesh ones but it is a cute little thing.

This melon is called "Moon and Stars" and also has yellow flesh. The leaves as well as the fruit are speckled with yellow moons and smaller stars. Really unusual and pretty plant to have. This one in particular is not very symmetrical, probably due to uneven pollination when it was just a little blossom, but it should turn out ok.

Blossom-end Rot

One of the most disheartening moments in my garden is when I plunge my hand through the tomato leaves, closing my fingers around a juicy red tomato...

... and pull it back to find the underside taken over by a nasty black splotch.

This is blossom-end rot. It occurs on the blossom end of the tomato (duh) and is a result of inadequate calcium at a critical stage during the fruit's growth. This deficiency means the cell walls are not sturdy enough, and results in a soft spot on the tomato, which then begins to rot while the tomato is still ripening.

What causes the calcium deficiency? It can be a lack of calcium in the soil itself, but it can also be a result of inconsistent watering or soil that is too dry or too wet, all of which affect how calcium is absorbed by the plant. Basically this disease is one that needs prevention, not treatment, since there's nothing you can do to reverse rot! If you get a lot of rainfall, unfortunately you may not have control over moisture levels, but in general it is something you can deal with by being diligent.

Fortunately the problem doesn't seem to be widespread in my tomatoes. These Amish paste tomatoes are an indeterminate variety, so they are continually flowering and producing new fruit throughout the season. So even though a few were deprived of calcium at one particular time, others seem to have gotten the nutrients they need and are ripening just fine.

Life Goes On

Unforeseen circumstances kept me from the garden for the last two weeks, though I was able to do a harvest a few cucumbers, zucchini, and summer squash during that time.

Luckily everything is still doing well despite my neglect. Putting straw down between most of the plants earlier this summer kept the weeds at bay for the most part, and nothing seems to have dried up without watering.

The melons got a late start, so I don't expect them to reach maximum size/flavor this year, but they are looking great!

Mini-pumpkins are so cute tucked away in the shade. They'll be plentiful this year, and will be a nice deep orange color once they ripen fully.

My Hercules pumpkins are doing great! If all continues to go well, there should be four big ones for carving in October. Two of them we were able to turn on their ends early enough in their growth so they will be nice and round, but the other two will be oblong side-lying pumpkins. They just got too big too quickly, and I didn't want to risk damaging the vines by twisting them around.

My Aji Cristal hot peppers are thriving in the heat. Time to pick a peck or a bushel and freeze away, since I just don't have time to turn them all into jam right now!

I really love my tomatillos, they are such a neat fruit to watch grow and fill out their husks. I had absolutely no worries about them during the last few weeks; as a Mexican plant they can certainly handle a dry spell or two.

And of course, the zucchini is still prolific!

Hornworms Begone

Ew, what are these tiny little grenades? Deer droppings? Too small. Rabbit? Still too small. Let's consult the internet. Ugh...

This is caterpillar poop. Left behind by either the tomato hornworm or the tobacco hornworm, both big fat types of caterpillars that demolish tomato plants (and tobacco plants, judging by the name). A little grossed out, but determined that my tomatoes will not be destroyed, I set out in search of the invaders.

I found one! But... wait... this is not a tomato plant. It is not a tobacco plant. This is a tomatillo plant. Mr. hornworm, you are confused. While mocking the destructive little idiot, I was able to identify him as a tobacco hornworm (the stinger on his butt is red instead of black, and he has seven diagonal stripes on each side instead of eight V-shaped marks). I found some gloves, peeled this guy off the stem (they hold on tight), and dropped him in a bucket of soapy water. The soap keeps them from getting out, and they drown. Muahaha!

Moving on to the tomato plants... I found quite a few more. How? One, look for that nasty black poop on the ground. I usually found them somewhere on the top of the plant I found the poop beneath. You can also look for stems that look like the leaves have been pulled off. The guy below is in the process of doing so. They are thorough eaters, they consume an entire leaf and move on. Did I mention they are huge? They're huge. The size of my index finger.

Most of the damage I found was near the top of the plant, which is also where all the hornworms were. During the hotter part of the day they tended to be slightly in the shade, but as the sun started going down they were happy to be right there on top of the plant. The guy below was happily munching away on a tomato, even with all those nice leaves around him. Bastard.

So he went swimming. Adieu!