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.