Jalapeño's and More!

Here is the first Jalapeño! The flower that I took a picture of the other week has really started to produce a fairly large fruit. Amazingly, these plants seem to be flourishing with the incredibly wet weather we have been having. As of last night, there are at least two other jalapeño's coming out, and about 10 more flowers right behind that. We are going to be up to our ears in these.



The white grapes are coming along nicely as well. This is a close up, but at a further distance then the previous shots. I would say these are now about half the size of a dime, and seem to be getting bigger everyday. The grape plant has also really taken off now that it has hit the fence. I am going to have to actively trim it to keep it from fully invading my neighbors flowerbed.


Here is a pic of the full garden. Its been a while since I posted one. As you can see, the tomatoes are out of control. I am not going to post this time, but on the left side of this picture is the one bush heirloom tomato plant, and it has at least 15 tomatoes on it, with what has to be 50 or 60 more flowers. This plant is out of control!

You can kind of see the brocolli in the background. It has also gotten crazy and is shooting up like a weed. I think this is a combination of two things. First, with the plants falling over, then being staked and bending and re-bending phototropically to get back to the light, they have ended up growing in a different way then normal. Combine that with the cold/wet weather which brocolli clearly thrives on, and voila, you have out of control brocolli. I took some other pictures that I will post later in the week. This area was also almost under water last week with the storms we had, those pics willl be coming too.


Speaking of standing water and massive amounts of rain. The pic above is of the bottom of the burpee tomato plants. The Chicago area received roughly 4" of rain on Friday (more in some places) and this of course was quite a bit more then the ground could swallow at one time. As a result, much of the bottom leaves of the tomato plants were covered with dirt that was kicked up from the rain, or coated on as the standing water receded. This caused the lower branches leaves to start to die. You can see the yellowing lower leaves above.


Instead of letting the plants continue to put energy into branches that have dead or dying leaves on them, I trimmed them off (thx, Eli). This is very common practice among gardening, and almost overnite those specific plants seemed to perk up a bit (their leaves were drooping). I ended up doing this more on the tomato plants ont he outside, then on the inside plants as they seemed to be affected the most, but I am going to contine to monitor them, and trim where necessary.

Next up are pics of the garden underwater, and the first harvest of the garden!