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.

Roses and Iris and Peonies, Oh My!

Roses, and iris, and peonies, are blooming away. It's a particularly good year for them - somehow the combination of rain and temperature has hit a sweet spot. Most of my efforts for the past month have been focused on vegetables and annual flowers, but this year I also get to reap the bounty from past years' investment in perennials.

I keep meaning to write a post about all my vegetable efforts, but I'm too busy actually doing the gardening. There is "the law of the farm" which is that certain things have to happen at certain times, or else they will never happen at all. For example, seed starting at the right time, or watering something about to die from thirst. I miss some windows, but I'm trying to keep up.

So instead of a detailed account, here are pretty pictures. 

About 3 years ago, an acquaintance offered several irises from his thinning.
I made a little bed along the walk from the side of my house.

I have a penchant for red roses.
This is actually a rose bush and a peony,
almost the exact same color.
Just outside my kitchen door.

Another red rose, this one along the front wall of my house.

Another passalong iris, in the bed by the side walk.

This spot is too shady, and so it always falls over.
Along my street.

Yet another red rose, climbing this time.
At the front street corner

Siberian iris, from my mother's garden in Bellport.

I'm not sure this dark purple iris has bloomed before.
It's along the back of the house, about two years old.

 

This is the dreaded invasive multiflora rose.
It needs to come out, but it is on the steep slope
along the street and so will require bullet-proof clothing
and a balancing act to remove.

 

Still Growing

 It’s been more than half a year, but I am here. In mid-December, I got a couple of my countertop units going. Now I have light and color in the middle of the bleakest month!