Cops better not try to snatch our crops
Have we given you the garden tour yet? It’s a good time for it. Everything is strong and healthy. The withering heat hasn’t hit yet and the bugs are only starting to notice the feast before them. Check it:
Here are two of our three raised beds. Eggplants and tomatoes there on the left. The other one is packed with tomatoes, peppers, and basil, and it’s only going to get more crowded, or should I say, intensive. Hi Bink!
We’ve had bad luck generally with peppers. Four out of the seven we planted have either been completely devoured or terminally crippled by bugs (I suspect pill bugs/roly polys). This one, called Early Sunsation, is doing pretty well. Googling, I only now discovered that it’s a yellow bell pepper. Sweet!
Our four basil plants are reaching for their lives amid the tomato foliage. I think they’ll do fine though. In fact last weekend they gave up some delicious, if blurry, pesto:
The first fruit on the scene, about 3 weeks ago, were these Solar Set tomatoes. It’s a hybrid variety and a determinate, which means it grows about 3 feet tall and almost all the fruit ripens over the course of a week or two.
Cherokee Purple, on the other hand is an heirloom and indeterminate which hopefully means it will be burying us in sweet purple tomatoes until the heat gets to it.
Fireworks is a hybrid that I guess gets its name either because it produces fruit around July 4th, or because of the crazy splash of blooms it puts out on each cluster.
The Florida Weave is either one of those dances old people do at weddings, or it’s the method we’re using to support this side bed of tomatoes. Seems to be going fine so far. These plants were all grown from seed that we collected from tomatoes in DC and we can’t quite remember what they were. We were certain they were Sungold cherries, but one of them now has a golf-ball-sized fruit on it, so who knows. It might even be a new cross, in which case we could grow it out for a few years and give it a name. “Backporch Beefsteak”?
This creature showed up on Monday, probably dropping off some future caterpillars to enjoy the buffet. I broke out some bio-warfare the next day, just to be safe.
And speaking of foreign critters, this is Jordan, who contributed to the garden by not digging it up during the 24 hours he spent in the backyard waiting for his owner to see our signs and come claim him.
12 Responses to “Cops better not try to snatch our crops”
Comment from jank
Time April 27, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Makes me want to break out the chainsaw and clear out some sun in our yard…
Comment from KMc
Time April 27, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Aha! Hemaris diffinis, Bublebee Moth.
Great selection there, K-Pho. This being our first Texas garden, I was pretty gung-ho about getting tomatoes in the ground to beat the mid-summer heat. But it is awfully nice to be this far along in April. However, we are now out of the lettuce and spinach business until October, and I’m jealous of those blueberries.
Comment from K.Chad Hauser
Time May 3, 2006 at 9:40 am
If long-term investment’s not a problem, plant some elephant garlic in the raised beds. It’ll take a year of waiting though, but man-0-man. Mmmmm, elephant-flavor!
Comment from etrigan
Time May 8, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Here’s a few snaps from our tomato garden this year. We have 8 plants — 5 from the Sunset Valley Farmers Market, 3 from SmiCollum Farms. The SmiCollum plants are, as yet, unidentified.
Black Cherry
Black Tula
Dona
Early Girl
No pictures of the Lemon Boy or the SmiCollum tomatoes. No pictures of any other plants or flowers, but I’m really excited about the dozen or so watermelon vines we’ve got. A few years ago I grew one vine and got one watermelon. My odds should be better this year.
Comment from KMc
Time May 9, 2006 at 12:19 pm
I can vouch for John’s plants being ridiculously healthy. It’s a jungle out there.
As for the mystery ‘maters John mentioned, all ours are rather dark green on top, which suggests they may be Green Zebra, which was a favorite farmer’s market buy when we were collecting seeds. However, we’ve got a bona fide GZ in the ground and the plant looks noticeably different from the others. There’s also some variation in shapes among our 7 mystery plants, so who knows what we’ll have?
And Cyn and I split our first ripe Sungold cherry last night. It was amazingly sweet.
Comment from jank
Time May 9, 2006 at 3:24 pm
In New England gardening news, the cherry tomato plant we were growing in a pot seems to have succumbed to the cold, and is now shriveled.
Comment from etrigan
Time May 18, 2006 at 12:22 pm
No real update on the ‘maters. I have more green ones than I can count, but they haven’t started coloring, yet. Here’s a snap of my jungle.
Welcome to the jungle, baby.
Comment from etrigan
Time May 29, 2006 at 3:08 pm
We had a ripening tomato this weekend. “Had” being the operative word. Jim apparently likes fresh garden tomatoes as much as we do.
Comment from KMc
Time May 31, 2006 at 11:45 am
How to Grow the Tomato and 115 Ways to Prepare it for the Table, Second Edition, August 1936
Fried tomato, boiled tomato, tomato sandwich, tomato soup, deviled tomato, stewed tomato …
Comment from Alison Stewart
Time June 21, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Looks good — I do Florida Weave myself.
Keep zapping those mothlike critters you had a picture of — they’re the adult form of the Squash Vine Borer, and they’ll take out anything but a butternut in no time flat (butternuts have solid stems that they can’t bore into). Bury the stems of your squash plants as much as you can, just to be safe.
—Alison
Comment from k-pho
Time June 23, 2006 at 10:55 am
Farm Report: veggies were in the ground at the end of May. Carrots, spinach and lettuce all looking good so far. Five tomato plants are growing in earnest, but I won’t know what varieties made it until I see some fruit as I neglected to label anything. Johnny’s sold out and I didn’t get my mail-order blueberry bushes as planned, so I bought three Patriots locally and got them in the ground mid-May. Berries are already showing, but will likely be too tart until the bushes mature. Maine has had an abundance of rain this spring/summer, which has caused all sorts of gardening delays (pick-your-own farm strawberries are usually available by now, etc). I’ll get some pictures up at some point. Until then, it’s vicarious living through you guys.
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Comment from k-pho
Time April 27, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I am so jealous. I just put my seeds in starter containers over the weekend, knowing full well I can’t get anything into the ground until end of May. Still hovering around 32F at night, don’t you know.
But in the spirit, here’s what I have on tap:
- Brandywine (OG) toms. Huge-ass, spicy, juicy beauties that required serious scaffolding last year. – Wonderlight (OG) toms. Yellow, look like lemons with a slight citrus taste. Grown in Siberia (!) – Dafel toms. Traditional, smaller, early red toms. – Whale (OG) spinach. New to me this year. – Black Seeded Simpson lettuce. Green leaf, also new to me this year. – Sugarsnax carrots. Surprisingly easy to grow, excellent taste. – Gourmet orange bells. Kelly, I feel your pain about bps, this will be my third year of trying. I have yet to produce more than one fruit before the plants get decimated. – Genovese Basil and Fernleaf Dill
aaaaaannnnnndd ….
- Three (3) highleaf blueberry bushes. Patriot (Early), Northland (Midseason) and Jersey (Late). The soil is right, the state is right, I WILL have fresh blueberries, goddammit! Well, in a couple of years anyway.