Getting a Grip

I'm starting to get a handle on things now, what with the new job, and the new schedule, and developing some new habits. It's keeping me busy (can't ya tell?). I have some garden pics to share - not terribly new ones, but they're pictures.


The cucumbers are starting to come, mostly from the seedlings I'd bought, the vines I planted as seed are really close though. The "True Lemon" cukes are starting to make male flowers, so I'm hoping to be able to show some of them off soon.


The green zebra tomatoes seem to only grow to about the size of a plum, but they have great flavor - AND . . . I've figured out how to tell if they're ripening - the light green bits start to turn yellow (I could also give them a gentle squeeze, but I try to avoid that one). The sad part is that parts of at least one of the green zebra vines seems to be suffering a bit, either from the dryness and heat or from some kind of pest or disease. I've started adding a little milk to the fertilizing mix, which I should have done a long time ago, so I'm hoping to see a little good come of that.



This tomato is growing on a vine that I stunted. (Ooops! Shame on me!) I was picking off suckers, like a good kid, and I accidentally mistook the growing top of the vine for a sucker and snapped it right off. It seems to be recovering nicely, but it took a while.


Growers notes for '08:

Add 1/2 cup milk to fertilizer mix for tomatoes and peppers - use weekly
Add Bone Meal, Granite and Cow to the soil Spring '08
after that just bone meal and cow, maybe some blood meal
Some lime might be good . . . not too much, but some
Make more room for zucchini
Design a layout, making space for all the fun veggies
Start more tomatoes from seed, that was fun
Tomato "patch" needs more nasturtiums, marigolds, basil, and thyme

Garden Cuteness

As promised, pictures of itty bitty vegetables! I'll tell ya though, I had to hunt for a while to find a tiny cuke - all the tiny ones I'd been watching have grown up considerably.

For scale comparison - the stems surrounding this baby squash (yellow zucchini) are about as bit around as my thumb, which, it should be noted, are likely bigger around than yours because I have fat fingers. But still - the squash isn't even as big around as a #2 pencil yet!



And this is the baby cuke - he's so tiny! And see? No flower yet - they grow to a point before the flower blossoms to be polinated. I saw a bee making the rounds in my cucumbers yesterday, so I'm hopeful for a decent crop. I want to get a picture of my other cukes - the lemon lookin' ones - but they are not quite to this point yet.



Mmmmm, pickly goodness! Yep, that's right, I'm makin' pickles! Sadly, I don't think my dill will be far enough along to use in making said pickles, but that's ok. I'm also hoping that I'll have cukes late enough into the summer that I can make some hot pickles with a jalapeno or an aurora pepper tucked into the jar. We'll see.

You learn something every day!

I was wandering around inspecting the plants in the vegetable bed the other day when I discovered something strange. While my cucumber and squash plants had been flowering for a couple of days, now there were flowers with miniature squash and cucumbers growing behind them. Now I expected to see this, eventually, as I knew that's how the squash and cucumbers developed, but the thing I couldn't understand was why the flowers growing on the ends of these tiny veggies were either new, or hadn't even opened yet.

Now, my vegetable growing experience consists mostly of tomatoes - and tomatoes flower, get polinated, the flower dies and a small green tomato forms where the flower had been. So these squash flowers were confusing me.

Enter the internet - answerer of many questions. I hit wikipedia and found this little tidbit:

"the flowers come in pollen-bearing male form, and the ovary-bearing female
form, with both forms being present on the plant."

So there you go - those first flowers were all males, and now my plants are starting to make female flowers. And let me just add that the tiny little yellow zucchini are really adorable. I will attempt to capture the cuteness this weekend.

When you're not looking . . .

We had supper at Mom's last night, because my aunt and uncle and cousins were in town. Great stories were told, and good times were had by all.

Anyway, I had a chance to step out into the garden while there the sun was still up, and wow, it had been busy while I was gone. Seriously. We found a tomato nearly the size of two fists, that we hadn't noticed at all before. I had to snap off the ends of the bean vines and some of the tomatoes, because if they kept growing they'd be too big for their supports. Sadly we also have one tomato plant that seems to be dying a slow death, but I'm hopeful to get a couple of tomatoes off of it before it goes. And the squash plants are getting huge; they may flower soon. The cucumbers are flowering already, and the beans shouldn't be far behind. It's exciting.

Bad Blogger . . . No Cookie!!

I have gotten an invitation to join the group of beta testers over at Ravelry. I'm very excited about this new resource. If you knit or crochet, and haven't heard of it - go check it out.

Anyway, in the process of setting up my little space on the site, I noticed that I had completed a project, and halfway completed another without taking any pictures of them! For shame! I am now in the process of rectifying that problem.

I've also noticed a habit developing in my posts, wherein I take pictures of garden progress and then allow them to ferment for two weeks or more before sharing them. So, I'd like to note that I took most of these pictures yesterday. It's getting pretty exciting in the rabbit prison.



The tomatoes are getting out of hand, at least as far as green and leafy stuff goes. They're getting a bit thick!


Just for comparison, the picture above was from yesterday, and the picture below is from the weekend after mother's day, when we planted the seedlings. It hasn't really been all that long, only 5 weeks. What you don't see is that there are a lot more weeds in the bed now, but I've relaxed a bit in my weeding, as the tomatoes are shading the soil so much that the weeds seem to be struggling. I just hope the basil, thyme and nasturtiums that I planted amongst the tomatoes and peppers will get enough sun.


There are blossoms all over the place. It seems I'm picking off extra blossoms more often than I'm picking off suckers!


My first Zebra tomatoes are showing their stripes. I had assumed that the stripes wouldn't come in until the fruit was ripe, but aparently I'll need a new way to determine ripeness.


And if ever there was a happy plant, it would be my italian sweet pepper. So far we have 7 decent sized peppers, and they're not done growing yet. When they're ready, they'll be red. No red yet, still time to grow!

So, about that garden update . . .

Once again, I'm behind, and these pictures are a little old . . . but it's progress.


The bed is shaping up nicely. The tomatoes are filling out; the beans, cucumbers, and squash have sprouted and are coming up nicely. The viney plants will be growing on those three tee-pee's in the back.


This one has two different kinds of cucumbers on it, though they're both supposed to be smallish green pickling cukes.


The green zebra tomato won the race for who was going to set fruit first, and when I checked them this morning, they were starting to show the telltale stripes.


I'm really hoping I've done better by the paste tomatoes this year. Last year they were planted in a spot that got too much shade, and they never really recovered. I really want to can or freeze as many of these as possible for use over the winter.


This is my little herb box. I wanted to get the herbs up higher, both for easier picking and for increased drainage. I've got rosemary, thyme, chamomile, two kinds of parsely, chives, and lavender. I transplanted the lavender from the window box I had at the apartment. It just wasn't happy there - it was getting swamped too often with winter and spring rains. I hope it likes it better in the bed.


But as you can see it bloomed despite the less than ideal conditions. I'm excited to see what the two varieties I have will do if I can get the conditions the way they'd like them. We'll just have to see I guess.

Little rabbit prisons . . .

Be vewy, vewy quiet . . . I'm hunting wabbits!

It's not a veritable vegetable penitentiary - it's rabbit prison.

Ok, so this is a little bit amusing, at least for me. First off, let me apologize, this pictures are at least two weeks old. It rained a good bit this weekend, so no new pics yet, but soon. Just imagine the picture below except the tomatoes are at least twice as tall, there are even more peppers (and more on the way, it's contagious I tell ya!), three bamboo stake teepee's in the back boxy areas for cucumbers and beans, two mounds for squash, and a small boxed in herb area.



There shall be the following goodies in the backyard this year . . . if all goes well:

2 Brandywine tomato vines (pink fruit)
2 Gold Medal tomato vines (yellow fruit)
2 Green Zebra tomato vines (green fruit with light green/yellow stripes)
3 Amish Paste tomato vines (for canning)
2-3 Brandyboy tomato vines (a hybrid given to us by a sweet friend, also pink)

1 Orange Bell pepper bush
1 Sweet Paprika pepper bush
1 Jimmy Nardelo's sweet red pepper bush (long skinny, good for roasting)
3 Jalapeno pepper bushes (we'll likely smoke those, chipotles!)
1+ Aurora pepper bush (only one seed sprouted so far, pretty colors, some heat)
1+ Poblano pepper bush (again, some smoking, anchos!)
**possibly more bell peppers as well, if I feel like it

Pole beans
Fancipak hybrid cucumbers (smallish)
Pickling cucumbers (smallish)
True Lemon cucumbers (small, round, yellow skinned)

Yellow Zucchini (yellow summer squash, really good grilled)
Leaf lettuce in the deep shade - to see if it works

An experiment to see if I can grow carrots - we'll see

Towards the end of the summer we'll put in:
Collards
Snap peas
Spinach
Lettuce
Turnips
Broccoli, perhaps



These are the tomatoes and peppers from Seedsavers - buried up to their necks, as the plants were a bit leggy. Now their thick and lush and strong. I'm imagining many tasty and colorful tomato sandwiches and salads this summer.

As to the rabbit references . . . as some of you may know, I battled with a rabbit last year who successfully killed off my snap pea crop. I even found myself sweating in the back yard two days before the wedding screwing old shutters together to keep the little guy out of the beans. Since that strategy seemed to work pretty well, we're hoping that "our high stone walls" will fend of the bunnies this year as well. I'll keep you updated.

Formula for Summer

A warm sunny Saturday
plus
two twenty somethings
plus
hand and power tools yields:



plus
three pallets of cinder blocks, twenty bags of sand, and 30 bags of gravel
plus



plus
another warm sunny Saturday
plus
two twenty somethings . . . and hopefully it will look like a lot of tasty food growing in the back yard.

Garden Update . . . It has pictures

Let's see now . . .

It's getting warmer, and with the rain we've been getting, the backyard garden (at mom's) is really booming.

The tomato crop is starting to come in, especially the grape tomatoes:



We're about to have a second wave of beans, and the first wave were nice and sweet, so we're excited to have more.



There are lots of big green tomatoes on the vines:



On a side note, I've become very fond of lemon basil tea - it's really quite tasty. So I'm trying to multiply my lemon basil crop so I'll have more to dry for tea.

The chamomile is still flowering madly, I'm excited to have that to sip all winter.

We rescued mom's rose bush from being swallowed by the hedge and it's been thanking us with blossoms:











The daylilies have also been quite happy:



But, then again, mom has always been good and growing low maintenance plants - it's her specialty.

I'm hoping, when Seth get's further into the impending pond project in the back yard, maybe we can grow some more daylilies in different colors - like not orange.

That's what we've got in the garden these days . . . not much going on on the fire escape at present, I'm still experimenting with how much sunlight some of these plants really need. Oh, wait, there is news - the Jalapeno on the fire escape now has four peppers growing on it, for a total of 5 so far. We smoked the first one, in an attempt at home made chipotle. It's an adventure, what can I say?

Back To My Garden

Seth and I had a really good time in Chincoteague, aside from our sunburn episode at the beach - I need to get better at reapplying my sunscreen. We saw some pretty countryside, and some cute shops. We wandered the trails on Assateague island, and only did what we wanted to. It was relaxing.

The only think I actually missed while we were gone was my garden - I'm such a nerd. When we left we had a tomato that was getting ready to chance, our first big one, and I didnt' really want to miss it. Turns out I didn't . . .