April 27, 2006
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.
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