Vegetable Bounty

Salad tomatoes, paste tomatoes, cucumbers,
mini cucumbers, peppers, cherry tomatoes

 There's a pretty good harvest going in some of the vegetables. I don't pick every day - I plan for when I can spend time cooking or otherwise preserving the harvest. The peppers were coming on strong when I got home from vacation on August 1. The cherry tomatoes were also full steam. The cucumbers were just starting.

Banana peppers, long green peppers, eggplants, basil,
shishito peppers

I grew two types of main crop tomatoes - early girl, and money maker. I think the ones I'm getting are money maker. They are big salad-sized, not huge slicers. They are still going strong, after a month. 

 I grew San Marzano roma-types. That plant started turning yellow from the bottom up, but I still got more than one sauce crop out of it. 

The bulk of the cherry tomatoes are gumdrop. They are bigger and darker than most cherry tomatoes. The plant in a pot is not doing well, but the one in the ground has become a jungle all by itself. It spread to all four trellis supports, and then up through the roof of the crop cage to cover it!  The fruits from the potted one are much smaller. I'm guessing the constrained roots can't support the rampant growth.

 I'm growing several varieties of sweet peppers in the green stalk. Mostly I cook with them, though I have some small bells that I have eaten as snacks. I bought a single shisito pepper plant at farmer's market and it has been prolific from June on. I fry the peppers in olive oil whole and just chomp them while holding onto the stem. Tasty!

The little eggplants persist. Every week or so I get a handful and cook them up in the oven or air fryer. I've mostly been eating them as a single dish, but this week I added the cooked eggplant to a ground lamb dish I had made, and it was not entirely unlike moussaka, after I added creme fraiche for creaminess. 

Roasted eggplant and fried shisito peppers

I have two kinds of cucumbers, pickle sized and full sized. I mostly eat the small ones as finger food, just munching on them. I grated up most of a full sized one to added to yogurt and garlic to make tzatziki sauce. Yum! I'm getting a half dozen little ones a week, which is more than I want to eat. But they are good snacks.

I seem to have failed to take a picture of my single zucchini. I have several very healthy plants, no sign of vine borers or other blights, but there are only male blossoms! I spotted one embryonic female about to bloom, and came back 48 hours later to find it a foot long and past optimal picking. I keep searching under the foliage but see no other fruits happening.

 My countertops are full of vegetables ready to be processed. I visited a friend and was amused to find she was the same, with tomatoes finishing ripening and peppers needing to be frozen.

I'm popping cherry tomatoes into bags and right into the freezer, whole and raw. I hear they will still make good sauce, which makes sense. The peppers I either cut and freeze raw, or saute with onions and freeze that way. I'm eating some form of pepper-and-tomato saute, some form of spaghetti, a couple of times a week. The eggplants get eaten right away, and I don't know if its possible to preserve cucumbers, so some of those go to waste.

Early August: It's a Jungle Out There!

The pot farm

 I hired a neighborhood urchin to water my plants in pots while I was gone. The pots need watering every day it doesn't rain - but it rained a lot! I had told the kid to help himself to vegetables, but there were still plenty for me. Things will start coming fast!

I have one tower of peppers (none hot). They are prolific!

I have one tower of eggplants, giant plants, the little fruits are coming in.

The middle tower had pak choi, but I harvested all of it and need to put something in - maybe flowers? Visit to Home Depot in my future. 

Harvest

Harvest cleaned up and ready to cook

Tomatoes on the left growing through the roof
Zucchini and cucumbers on the right; 
blooming but no fruit yet.

 

Where to Put my Vegetables?

 I have limited space to grow vegetables. While I have a substantial yard, I can only grow vegetables where there is (1) sufficient sun and (2) protection from the deer. In addition, I'm reluctant to plop a vegetable bed down smack dab in the middle of my yard - I'd rather have them on the edges. As a consequence, these are the spaces I have:

This is a metal 3'x4' raised bed on the side of my house.
It is planted right now with broccoli and red cabbage.

This is a wooden 4'x8' raised bed I built years ago, at the back of my house.
I bought the frame and netting that covers it (new netting this year).
It has tomatoes in half of it, and I plan for zucchini in the other half.

This is a collection of pots, all planted with tomatoes.
They are easily moveable. Currently sitting on a wooden pallet
next to my driveway. Needs more deer & rabbit protection.

These are my latest additions, "Greenstalks". Not a gimmick.
Each tier has six pockets, so I have 72 planting pockets to fill.
I'm in the process of building a barrier behind them for deer protection.
They are where the Vespa used to park, at the end of my driveway.
(Now the Vespa is on dirt in the shade, I need to build a new pad).

 I try to rotate my crops in the raised beds, to minimize pests that overwinter in the soil. Last year in the metal bed I raised zucchini, so this year I've gone for the brassicas, broccoli and cabbage. Also, conveniently, this bed was easy to clean and prepare for spring planting with the addition of bagged compost, so it was ready when I spotted broccoli, a cold weather crop, at Home Depot. Last year, the big 4x8 bed had tomatoes in one half, and corn and beans in the other half. So this year, I've put tomatoes in the half that had corn, and I plan to put zucchini in the other half once it warms up enough.

I refresh the dirt in the pots and the greenstalk, so rotation isn't necessary. Basically, I empty them out (usually to a tarp on the ground) and then stir new compost and maybe new potting soil into the old dirt. I fish out any big chunks of last year's roots, and then put the refreshed mixture back in the containers. It's actually a fair amount of work, but since I wanted to move and add greenstalks, it was worth it this year.

The big experiments are the Greenstalks. I belong to some on-line gardening groups which is where I learned about them. I had seven tiers split into two stacks last year, mostly with peppers and basil. They revolve on their bases, so I can vary the sun exposure. This year, I have twelve tiers, with six spots each, for a total of 72 planting pockets. But I've started more seeds than I have spaces!

So far I have 18 various peppers out in the bottom 3 tiers of the light green tower; lettuce and scallions from seed in its top tier. The top tier of the mixed tower has various herbs from farmers market; the second tier has mini cabbage plants. Inside under lights I have a dozen pak chois, six Swiss chards, 18 eggplants, and 30 (!) basils coming along. The seedlings are too small, and it's too cold, to set them out today - but it'll be time soon!

I'll be able to squeeze a bunch of basil plants along the perimeter and between tomato and zucchinis in the big raised bed. Discounting them, I've got 36 planting pockets, and 36 seedlings (12 pak choi + 6 chard + 18 eggplants), so it just works out! 

Also, I am going to start harvesting my broccoli (in the metal raised bed) today. It'll continue to bear from side shoots for a while, but I may end up ripping it out and putting something completely different in there. Some of the herbs and greens in the greenstalks will also sputter out and I'll be able to put something new there. So as long as I don't go overboard at farmer's markets or starting any more of my many seeds, I guess I'll be ok.

Still Growing!

I'm still kind of coasting on gardening this year, but I haven't been completely inactive.

First, on the coasting, I've got some blooms showing up from prior years:

The trout lilies have made a big patch,
but not so many blooms

The bloodroot continues to shine bright
It moves around as the ants plant seeds

The sole remaining tulip from a big bunch
planted in 2019.

I do have plans for vegetables this year. I've rearranged some things in the yard, because I realized the parking pad I built for the Vespa was the sunniest spot in the whole yard. So I moved the Vespa, and I'll be doing Greenstalks on the parking pad. (Need to build a new pad for the Vespa but right now its on the dirt.) I'm rotating crops in the ground - I'll grow cruciferous veggies in the raised bed where the zucchini was last year. I got a six pack of broccoli at Home Depot and plopped them in there, after topping off the bed with LeafGro and compost. I plan to put tomatoes in the half of the big raised bed where I had the corn and beans last year, and zucchini in the half where the tomatoes were. I'll need to put some tomatoes in pots.

My baby broccoli

The hard thing is deciding how to fill up three 4-tier greenstalks - a total of 72 planting pockets. I need to get going on seed starts or buying plants will bankrupt me!
 

Countertop Gardening

Lettuces. Could be eaten at this size, but
I'm greedy and keep them going.

 I'm still using my indoor hydroponic gardens, though all but the basement tomatoes were shut down for the summer. I started lettuces and bok choi the second week of October. I was able to start eating in about five weeks. I started my second batch of lettuce then - the third week of November. 

Baby bok choi

I finished the bok choi (baby sized) the first week of December - so about 9 weeks total. The first batch of lettuces, which I'd been using for salads and sandwiches straight through from when I started the harvest, was pretty much done by then. I left them, and got a few more leaves before finally trashing them this week - so 10 weeks total.

Isn't this gorgeous?

I started swiss chard about a week after the first batch of lettuce, mid-October. Tonight I based a meal around harvested chard - the third time I've done that. It'll keep going, I think, for quite some time. I base my harvests on when it grows too tall for the container, and the stems are still relatively small and easy to cook and eat. I could move the chard to jars to get bigger, but I'm going for at least one more batch in the machine. I think they are really attractive! They brighten the place up considerably.

Post harvest, I swear they grew an inch in a couple of hours!
I think these will keep going for quite some time.

I've started a batch of herbs, just last week. Not all have even sprouted yet.

2024 Vegetable Wrap-Up

My peppers, bought onions

I thought I would recap what happened this year, what worked and what didn't work. It was my most successful vegetable gardening in years. While we haven't had a frost yet, and the plants are mostly still alive, there won't be any more harvests.

First, peppers. I only put them in the Greenstalk, my rotating vertical grower. They did very very well. When I first set them in place, they took a small beating from small pests (holes in the leaves) but I sprayed with an organic bug spray and also trapped many slugs in beer traps, and from then on they took off. I watered daily during the drought and I fertilized them every couple of weeks through the end of July. 

I probably won't grow the same varieties of peppers again. I mostly planted "mini-bells", sweet peppers that only get to be a few inches big. They were very tasty, but WAY TOO MUCH WORK TO EAT!!!  The teeny little things required de-seeding just like a big bell, but it took a lot of them to make a meal. The orange variety seemed much more prolific than the red ones, and I had a purely green, round, one as well (Cupid) with an especially good taste. I also planted one variety of normal-sized banana peppers, long and skinny, and they were good, but more prone to insect damage than the others. I'm going to look for classic bells and fatter Italian frying peppers next year. (I do not do hot peppers.)

And basil! I had SO MUCH basil! I started 24 basil plants from seed, and plopped in a plant to each of the unused slots in the Greenstalk. I had four varieties - Napolitano, Genovese, Tuscany, and Thai. I also put a half-dozen plants into the ground. I had basil extravaganza for the whole summer! It loved the heat, and I watered daily during the drought. The Thai basil plants in the ground got as tall as me! It's not my favorite variety of Thai, I'll look for a new one next year. I bought parsley plants, flat leaf and curly, at farmer's market and put in the Greenstalk, where they did well. I also bought cilantro plants, twice, and placed in the Greenstalk, but they both died quickly.

And tomatoes! I did regular tomatoes in the ground and in individual pots, and cherry tomatoes in the Greenstalks. (Same variety cherry tomato as I grow inside hydroponically.)  I basically got no cherry tomatoes outside, maybe one or two. I think the bunnies may have gotten to them - they were accessible, though slightly protected. And my big tomatoe plants were partially protected. I had four plants in the ground, inside netting that was easily broken by the animals - and it was shredded by them on Bastille Day, in the middle of July, when the plants were bursting with plenty of green tomatoes and no ripe ones. (see this post). I had picked a few green-but-clearly-ripening tomatoes before the massacre. I repaired the damage as best I could a few days later, and the plants survived their haircuts and proceeded to set a new crop of fruit. I got maybe a dozen tomatoes in all (maybe a bit more). The tomato plants in pots were basically unprotected from the critters and took many haircuts besides having fruit stolen. I did get a couple of handfuls of tomatoes from the five plants in pots. I fertilized all the tomato plants every 2-3 weeks (pots slightly more often) through the end of July. I don't think I fertilized after that.

I did two of the three sisters, corn and beans. I got some little corn before the massacre. The beans, inter-planted at the foot of the corn stalks, continued to grow post-massacre, and I harvested a few handfuls of very attractive pods. I shelled the beans, they yielded about 3/4 of a cup, and boiled them, ate them in a vinegar and oil dressing, and was pleased. But I don't know that either the corn or beans were worth the garden space. Corn from the farmer's market is easier, and I like beans from a can. 

I had my best zucchini harvest in years! It wasn't anything to boast about, by zucchini growing standards, but I actually got maybe a dozen or more zucchini to eat! I planted in my raised bed with new soil, and draped the whole thing with insect netting, fastened down all around the edge of the bed. After the plants started blooming with female blossoms, I replaced the fine-meshed insect netting with wider-meshed critter netting, to allow for natural pollination while still keeping the deer, rabbits and squirrels out. I watered, but far from daily, maybe more like weekly. I sprayed the plants with the organic insect spray, put out slug traps (but slugs didn't seem a problem) and sprayed a couple of times with BT, which is specific for caterpillars. I think I thwarted the squash vine borer, which is a moth that lays its eggs inside the vines, for the emergent caterpillars to eat their way out. 

This was my first year for potatoes! I bought seed potatoes on impulse at the hardware store, and I planted them into three 5-gallon growbags. I harvested one bag at the end of July, and the other two about 10 days ago. It was so fun to peel back the bag, and plunge my hands into the dirt feeling for the little potatoes! The thing to worry about potatoes is their turning green. The green is actually just chlorophyll, which is fine, but bad chemicals (solanine) often develop as the potatoes are turning green. I scrubbed, cooked and ate the potatoes the day they were harvested, and I think a few of the potatoes had some solanine. Some of them were bitter to the taste, and I felt queasy after eating them. How odd, but I won't be doing potatoes again. 

But it's all an experiment, and the fun is in the doing and finding out. I don't know what I'll do next year, but whatever I do, I know I need better pest and critter barriers.

Promises Fulfilled!

On the cloth, clockwise from top right:
Sweet Sunset banana peppers,
Cupid pepper mini-bell,
Fresh Orange not-yet-ripe,
Flambo Shell beans,
Fresh Orange mini-bell,
Fresh Red mini-bell,
with various tomatoes along the top.

 Tomatoes and peppers, and a few beans.

I'm picking tomatoes before they are fully ripe, because critters (probably squirrels) are also going for them, though they like them soft and red. 

I'm pretty sure I'll be making a version of spaghetti sometime soon. Right now, I've got the banana peppers cooking slowly in a pan with onions - going for a couple of hours.

I'll have to do some research on what to do with the beans. The idea is to eat the beans not the pods. I don't know if they can be boiled and eaten right away, or if they need to be dried, and then soaked, before cooking.

More Promises

I've been getting lots of little peppers! They are cute, but a lot of work to eat, because each has to be cleaned. I've also had 4-5 more zucchini! Officially the best zucchini year ever! The outdoor cherry tomatoes are smaller than the plants inside, and less prolific. I did fertilize all the greenstalk veggies about a week ago, to keep them going.

Inside the crop cage,
with dead corn propping them up

But the big news is the big tomato plants have come back from their animal depredations and are full of green tomatoes! The ones in pots have a few tomatoes and more blooms. The ones in the crop cage a really big and have several tomatoes. I did patch the crop cage, but it's still vulnerable. We'll see if the critters feel a need to assault it. I'll definitely pick before ripeness, but they are solidly green now and its too early to pick them. I like to see them starting to change color before I pick.

Today's Haul

Today's haul

 I harvested the most and nicest zucchini I've grown in years! OK, it's TWO smallish ones, but it's still record-setting. And, I've got more coming along, and so far the protection is working.

In other news, there might not be any more outdoor tomatoes. My big plants have all been mauled by large critters. I do have healthy indoor cherry tomato plants producing away.

On the plus side, there are several small pepper plants coming along with small fruit on them, all in my greenstalk planter. And, of course, more than enough basil (and parsley) to feed the entire Italian army. 

The zucchini behind its barrier
(too many plants, should have thinned)

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Munched corn, with a big new hole
in the netting visible.

My garden, on the cusp of delivering on its bountiful promise of just a few days ago, has been decimated! My crop cage, string netting surrounding and covering my big wood bed where my corn and tomatoes are, has been shredded. I think deer may have breached it initially, but yesterday the squirrels made it their own and ravaged it completely. Pretty much every ear of corn has been munched to nothing. The tomatoes are all gone, and the plants are buckled and broken. 

Five years I’ve had the net, and finally it was breached. I think the heat and drought are driving the beasts to get more creative and forceful to eat lush moist vegetables.

Only the basil remains almost untouched. 

I’m so glad I harvested corn and tomatoes when I did. I’ll see what happens to the ravaged tomato plants- they may survive. 

I still have 4 tomato plants in pots, but they have been pruned back by munching deer and aren’t showing a lot of fruit. They are not well protected at all. But squirrels rarely go there. We’ll see how it goes.

I also have the greenstalk towers, with cherry tomatoes and tiny peppers, and basil. Something to take care of and pick from. I also have the zucchini, sequestered in its own bed. It’s protected from a casual browse, but not from a determined assault. 

Now I have to think through more sturdy pest control solutions. Sigh. 

Tomato Massacre

This morning, when I went out to water my plants in pots, I discovered one of them had been completely massacred! The huge pot had been overturned and emptied with the dirt spread all over the driveway. The large Early Girl tomato plant, previously covered with green tomatoes, was snapped off at the ground level, shredded and denuded of all fruit. Sigh. All gone, nothing to do about it. I assume a deer. I moved around my remaining pots to use my large lime tree (which has thorns) to protect the remaining pots. But they are not behind a big fence, so they remain vulnerable.

But it's far from only bad news in the garden. I decided to make a harvest today, partly because I figured I'd better grab some before the animals do!

I've got a small harvest of tomatoes, mostly salad-sized, mostly Early Girl variety. I picked some that are not yet fully ripe - there is a school of thought that says it relieves the plant of a burden so it can continue to make more tomatoes. Once tomatoes start to ripen, they will continue even if picked. And flavor is based on the variety of tomato, not on maturity when picked. (Modern tasteless supermarket tomatoes result from breeding varieties for good transport qualities while ignoring taste - it doesn't have to do with when they are picked.)

I planted a few pepper varieties, based on seeds I already had in the house. None of the peppers are full-sized bell peppers. I've got banana peppers, and small bells that will turn bright colors. I picked some yellow bananas and tiny green bells. I'll probably let the next tranche ripen to more vivid colors.

I went ahead and picked some of my corn! What I read was it's ready to be picked when the corn silk turns brown. But I saw ears with a lot of the silk just gone - and the ears had a lot of ants crawling on them. All of my gardening is only entertainment and experiments, so I figured let's just go see whats going on inside the husks. 

The ears are small and misshapen, and the kernels are irregular. But there are some regular-sized kernals, and I think I'll use a knife to cut off the good ones and cook them in a skillet as part of a veggie saute. (Apparently each thread of cornsilk is tied to a specific kernel - if it gets fertilized, it grows into a plump kernel.)

I've also made my zucchini more vulnerable to pests, but also open to being pollinated by insects. I had it completely under insect mesh, and I attempted some manual fertilization. But I haven't had great success with that. I was defending against a pest called the Squash Vine Borer, but supposedly it's an early season pest, so the odds are much less it will show up now. So now it's under a larger plastic mesh, which hopefully keeps deer and rabbits away, but allows the beneficial insects in.

Full of Promise

Early Girl tomatoes

Right now, the vegetable garden is still looking good. My tomato plants in the ground and in pots are all thriving - no sign of disease, leaves not munched by anything, many blooms and a few fruit forming. One of my tomato plants in the ground, an Early Girl variety, is taller than me. Peppers in my greenstalk towers have recovered from their original slug leaf holes, and just now starting to flower. The corn is about waist high, and I planted beans between the stalks and they are up about six inches; they are not yet climbing up the corn as they are supposed to. The zucchini in its veiled bed has sprung up into giant plants. They are not yet blooming at all, but the plants are big and healthy. My potatoes in bags are full to the top with dirt and just now starting to bloom. The book says that's the time they start making little potatoes down below. I'm very excited about the potatoes!

My zucchini under its anti-bug veil

I've been tending the plants much more this year than in past years. I've used bug spray and slug pellets. I water nearly every day if it doesn't rain. I amended the soil heavily before planting, and I've fertilized all of the fruiting vegetables a couple of times now. I have a rough schedule - the next round of fertilization will be around the end of the month. 

My greenstalk with peppers, herbs
and cherry tomatoes

But it's still mostly promise at this point, nothing to actually eat! Except, in the greenstalks, I planted herbs and one swiss chard (chard was my only successful outdoor vegetable last year). I had to cut back some of the basils and parsleys and dills and the big leaves of the chard. I washed and cleaned them up, and will sautee the chard with some of the herbs - I think I might make an omelet with a bunch of the rest of the herbs and have that for dinner with the chard.

Farming

I'm making yet another run at trying vegetables this year. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful for the past few years, but I'm doubling down on my efforts. Last year, I ran out of energy and just went for the hydroponic small eggplants and cherry tomatoes. I found the plants very attractive to look at, and also very attractive to insects. So I got vegetables to eat, but not oodles. I never put any vegetable plants directly in the ground, but let my raised beds and large pots stay fallow.

My flimsy structure in 2022,
covered in netting

The year before last (2022), I tried physical barriers to keep the bugs and larger pests out. I put a pop-up net tent in my side yard, and then I built a (too-flimsy) frame out of PVC pipe and covered it with bird netting. It kept the deer and birds out, but not bugs. Inside the shelter I had pots - with tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini. I also wrapped the stems of the zucchini in tin foil in an effort to foil the squash vine borer. All of my protection attempts were to no avail. I had aphids, I had spider mites, I had viruses (virusi?) and fungi, and I had squash vine borers. So I got two tomatoes and one feeble zucchini out of it - I think also a couple of smallish eggplants. In my 4x8 garden cage in back of my house, I tried tomatoes and peas and beans. I got some beans, and came to the realization I don't really like just plain green beans, even very beany ones fresh from the garden. And there was a lot of slug damage. My only success that year was with swiss chard - I planted it out early, and it kept going until the hardest frost in December. It was covered in slugs for much of the year, but in the fall it was actually lovely as I guess the slugs were taking their winter naps.

4 tomatoes and a block of corn
totally caged from deer

But hope springs eternal among us gardeners. I've maintained some momentum this spring in order to get things moving on the vegetable front, and I'm trying several new things.  For starters, I've done a lot with soil amendments and fertilizer before planting. I have fertilizer on hand and a basic schedule of when to apply, to be adjusted as I see how things are going.

I started tomatoes and peppers and basil from seeds indoors. In my 4x8 cage, I've got four tomato plants, and a 4x4 block of sweet corn. I grew sweet corn in this spot once before several years ago, but I lost enthusiasm and didn't water it and it turned into light brown husks. My technique, developed from the internet, was to plant 4 seeds in each square foot. Just yesterday, I thinned what had sprouted to two plants per square foot. I read that this dense planting may lead to smaller ears, but corn requires density to pollinate - each plant relies on its neighbors to get the job done. My plan is to plant vining shell beans around the bottom when the plants get to be about a foot high. (Currently they are about 6" only.) I also put basil plants around the tomatoes.

My netted zucchini bed

I bought metal raised garden beds two years ago. Last year, I put together one of them. This year, I finally filled it up and built a crop cover for it. (Why hurry? There's always next year.) Just today, I planted zucchini there. I didn't fill it to capacity with zucchini plants - advice is to do so some succession planting to try to defeat the pests. The cover on the bed is insect netting which is pretty much tulle fabric. Hard to work with, but I think I have it anchored well. We'll see if it defeats the bad bugs!

I bought a vertical planter, a Greenstalk. It has five tiers of six planting spots each, and it spins on a base. After seeing how high it was, I decided I didn't want to garden above shoulder height, so I bought one more tier and split it into two towers of three tiers each. In the greenstalks I have cherry tomatoes (the same variety I grow indoors) and peppers and basils and herbs. I had started all the little plants from seeds and they looked great when I planted them out. But the peppers have been severely munched, so it's time to get out the spray. I'm going to apply Captain Jack's Deadbug Spray first thing tomorrow to everything in the greenstalks, and also to the tomatoes in the ground and in pots.Any innovative thing will have enthusiasts, and the enthusiasts will have internet discussion groups. There is a lot of overlap between the hydroponic enthusiasts and the greenstalk enthusiasts, which is how I learned about them, and also how I learned about Captain Jack's. I haven't yet put up a barrier to keep deer out of the greenstalks. Where they are is kind of a cul de sac for the deer, so far they just haven't come through.

A planted greenstalk

My final experiment year (so far) is potatoes. I bought seed potatoes at the hardware store, and I've got them in grow bags. Per internet advice, I planted them shallowly at the bottom of the bag, and I'm supposed to add dirt as the visible green plants grow. To harvest, I simply empty the bag. My first bag has sprouted and grown up enough to need more dirt. I tried potatoes once years ago, and got nothing despite luxuriant foliage. We'll see this time!

Greenstalks, with my citrus grove in the background

My munched pepper.
It's not dead, but its weakened.

Eggplant Porn; or, I Ate My Babies!

 In early March I planted two varieties of small eggplants in my automated hydroponic unit. I had good germination success, and thinned the unit down to one plant of each variety: Patio Baby and Fairytale. The thinnings went into various containers - two into passive hydroponics, and three into dirt pots. I now have massive plants, medium plants, and small plants (with the Fairytale plants being smaller, but growing conditions also account for differences). All are blooming, and the Patio Baby in the automated hydroponics actually produced a harvest! I ate them last night, a cute tasty side dish to my meal.

My automated unit with two plants today

Blooms! Time to start pollinating!

Pollination works!

This is my passive hydroponic (Kratky) plant.
I picked the large jar from my neighbor's recycling bin.

I moved this plant outdoors because it had aphids.
I washed it, and I'm treating it with neem oil.
I added the trellis - it wasn't used to the wind!
But it has a baby fruit, and many blooms!
More fertilizer needed!

First harvest

Air fried with olive oil. YUM!

Tomatoes

I planted cherry tomatoes in my big new hydroponic Farm on New Years Day. I am now eating them! The plants are compact, less than a foot tall, and laden with fruit. I pollinated them by hand, since there are no bees indoors.

After the flood that is coming, I'm not sure if I'll leave the plants, hoping for a new harvest, or if I'll plant something new.

Salads!

My herbs (some of them)

I am getting a ridiculous amount of pleasure playing with my indoor plants, especially the hydroponic salad garden. I started up in early December, and I've got lettuce enough to keep me in a daily salad. In about a month, I'm going to have a deluge of cherry tomatoes (god willing and the creek don't rise). I don't know that a million cherry tomatoes is ever needed, but I can always cook them down into a quick sauce, since I also am drowning in basil (with sides of oregano, thyme and dill). 

They do require tending, however, it's not just set and forget. The plants in the countertop units need water and liquid nutrients, and the lights on the front of the units helpfully signal when to take care of that. The lights and the water pumps are on automatic timers, and once you've told it when to turn on in the morning (I have them come on at about sunrise) then they are set. But the roots get tangled in the filter and pumps, and regular harvesting is necessary once they get to a certain size.

Seven tomato plants, blooming under my own lights.
That's an old car windshield-screen, reflecting back

The jars need refilling with nutrient-rich mixture, every few days. It's kind of a production, getting my used jugs (picked from the neighbors' recycling boxes) and measuring and mixing the solution, checking each jar, and taking off the lids and topping them off properly. And I had to set the place up, with adjustable shelves to keep the jars the right distance from the lights, and putting my own grow lights on a (simple mechanical) timer.

The big basement unit is smarter than the countertop units and talks to an app on my phone to remind me to top off the water and nutrients. But it also requires maintenance, and I've run into a couple of problems with roots jamming the sensors. 

Blooms and babies!

But spending time tending my salad gardens makes me happy!

Today's lunch
No slugs or bugs!

 

Mostly lettuce in one half of the basement farm
Different colors and shapes and tastes