Cool Weather, Smaller Harvests, and Phase I of garden 2010

Ok, so I have been posting EVERY picture of the produce anymore. It was getting to the point of absurdity. This was the harvest from Wed 8/26. Since then I have been to the garden three more times and gotten similar amounts of produce. I figure since we have moved past 2000 individual pieces of produce, it was time to stop counting and just say that it was worth the money spent to grow my own vegetables.

Also, I am really unsure how many more tomatoes are going to come out of the garden. There is lots of green fruit growth in there, but the maturation process seems to have been stunted by the cool wet weather we have been having. I am actually seeing some new blooms lower on the plant, and I almost wonder if these plants have shifted gears, and are trying for new growth instead of ripening. The maturation is generally associated with warmer weather, and we have been woefully short of that over the past few weeks. It is supposed to warm up as the week goes on, so it will be interesting to see how quickly the ripening picks back up, or if it stagnates. I guess we could either have a large amount more tomatoes, or we could be done. Either way, I will live....


This is funny. The blueberry plant that had five blooms shortly after I planted it really never seemed to fully ripen. Well, it was pretty close to the edge of the Juliets, and as they got out of control, the blueberry plant eventually got swallowed up by the tomato plant. I was out in the garden yesterday working through the messy corner where the Juliets mesh with the one Heirloom and I pulled the plant back to find....One lone blueberry, fully ripe and ready to eat. Who knows how long it was actually in there, but it looked great, and Jen said it tasted good as well.


The great news is the bell peppers are amazing. They are incredibly sweet and firm if left on the plant long enough to ripen. Also, since I have taken down the broccoli, the southern most row of peppers have seemed to really go nuts, the peppers are HUGE. I find it very interesting that if you take these peppers off the vine when they are green, they never really change colors. However, if they are halfway or more to their pre-determined color, they will ripen very quickly once taken off the plant.


Quick shot of the garden without broccoli. Things seem much healthier with all of the peppers since they have stopped obscuring them.


Ok. Here is where it starts. Garden 2010. Its gonna be a whole different attitude. That big blob of brown there is where the cement parking pad used to be until I had it removed about 2 weeks ago. The plan is to remove ALL of the grass in the entire backyard, and turn the whole space into a garden. I think this will essentially be 5 times the size of the current garden. You might ask yourself why? Why Dave? Well, the answer is that this year was my testing ground both for the viability of the soil as well as my accord/discord with gardening. Well, I like gardening, and the soil seems to be :) SO, the goal will be to plant a very diverse (and well spaced) garden next year with many different types of vegetables, and some fruit that actually fruits :)

I started taking the grass off part of the yard over the weekend, and its going to take me most of the fall to get this done. My plan is to take the grass off, rototill everything, have some dirt brought in to fill the low spot where water collects, and to cover the gravel area where the cement was, and then rototill again adding peat etc to the mix.

I will update as things get closer to showing any sort of progress, as of right now, you cant even tell I did anything.

Monsoon Season

The rain just never seems to stop.....EVER. It has been raining off and on (and pretty hard) for close to 48hrs, and frankly I am getting sick of it. The concern is that at this point the Burpee's are going to start splitting because they just cant help themselves from taking big gulps of the rain water. Yikes.

Rain or shine, I am going to have to get out there tonite at some point and get some of the more ripe Burpee's off the vine to keep them from splitting when I might normally let them go.

We'll see how it goes.

Two more big hauls and Peppers Ripening

This is actually only the first of two shots from the harvest today. I am not going to post the second one only because its mainly Juliets, and there have been plenty of pictures of those. In all, there are:

84 Jalepenos
293 LaRoma's
288 Juliet's
59 Big Boys
1 Orange Pepper : )

All in all it took my dad and I the better part of an hour to get these out of the garden. The LaRoma's specifically seem to close down as they grow, and you have to almost reach up the plant inside the cage to get them. Because these are cooking tomatoes, I have been looking to find a use for them. Besides giving them to a friends Italian Dry Cleaner, most of these will be going to the church connected to Nora's new school as a food donation. I am not going to end up doing anything with these, so they might as well be put to good use.


This is from Tuesday night. I picked tomatoes in the rain for about an hour or so, and came up with this haul. This is 315 Juliet's, and 53 Burpees. That includes the beast of a tomato on the bottom left side of the Burpee's. That tomato has to be more then a pound. Its a monstrous piece of fruit. I immediately bagged most of the these and handed them out to friends and family.


Orange Peppers!!! I have to say, its taken an TON of patience to let these peppers mature the way they have. It takes a frickin long time for these peppers to mature to the point they actually start changing colors. Crazy enough, they are all starting to turn now. We are going to have a whole lot of orange and red peppers, and I am really looking forward to it.


And....here is an orange pepper. The only one that really deserved to be taken off. This one is about 90% orangish-yellow. I plan on cutting this up tomorrow to see how sweet it is. I have high hopes as these were pretty darn good as green peppers :).


And then there is the broccoli. My only failure as a gardener to this point. The broccoli just never came out of flowering mode. From what I have read, its seems to be the cool wet weather has fooled this plant into thinking its still spring, and therefore it still flowering. It literally has been flowering for 3.5 months. I am going to be ripping this out tomorrow as its not going to go anywhere, and its starting to encroaching on the row of peppers next to it with late day sun. I figure there is no reason to deprive the peppers in any way for something that isnt going to produce. If you dont get it done, you are out :)

We're Gonna Need A Bigger Table

This picture is from Monday 8/10. I had to head to Seattle, and Nora and I went out to the garden before I left. This was the biggest single harvest to date (until Friday). The tally on this harvest is 315 Juliets, 11 Burpee, 4 Heirloom, 20 La Roma, and 11 Jalapeno's. An absolute massive amount of tomatoes.


This is Friday 8/14. Just a ridiculous volume of tomatoes. I was out of town for almost the whole week, and as a result the garden didnt get any water, and it was quite hot and dry. This clearly kicked the Burpee's into high gear as you can see a lot of them on the right. The tally here is 426 Juliet's, 45 La Roma's, 36 Burpee's, and 22 Jalapenos (not pictured). These barely fit on the table. Several of the Burpee's on the right are near two pounds (just based on holding it).


I just love how some of the tomatoes slowly turn color closer to the top. This is a close-up of the top of one of the Burpees as its turning. If you click on the picture, you can see the color variation pretty well. Most of the tomatoes seem to do this at the top, but this one seemed to be a bit more overt then most.


The other fun thing about picking tomatoes lately has been seen all of the "aberrations" from the normal tomato. As you can see, this tomato happens to have a small growth coming out of the top. This is legitimate tomato and tasted pretty good : ). I have seen some that have growths like this, some that are grown together, and others that are just mis-shaped.

Some of the peppers are finally starting to change color. I am going to get some pictures this week and post them.

Introducing Burpee's, La Roma's, and Hints of Malady

200 plus tomatoes!! The basket that I am using to collect these vegetables each time I go to the garden has started to be full when I am finished. So here we have 9 Green peppers, 215 Juliets, 3 Burpee's, 8 heirlooms, and 3 La Roma's. More on the first Burpees and La Roma's below.


This is the La Roma tomato on the right. The La Roma tomato is known as a "paste tomato." I didnt quite understand what this meant until I pulled the first ripe one off the vine. This tomato is so light. I couldnt believe how light it was. I would venture to guess that if weighed, one of the Juliet's, which are half the size, would weigh as much or more as a La Roma. Essentially, there is little to no juice to the tomato.

Its going to be interesting finding a use for these. I think we may be making some tomato paste.


This is the Big Boy or Burpee tomato. This is a medium sized tomato compared to what I am seeing growing on the plants right now. The quarter doesnt do a very good job of giving you the scale, but I would be this tomato weighs over a pound. I ended up cutting this tomato up on Saturday night for a sandwich, and let me tell you, it was a good tomato. Nice and juicy, and fairly firm. This was the tomato that I was most worried about, as its easy to get dry, or mealy tomatoes from this breed.



I have seen a few spate instances of maladies in some of the tomatoes. This is whats called cracking in tomatoes. Generally this happens when the tomato is left on the vine too long and becomes over-ripe. I am not sure that is the case here, but its very possible that because this tomato was so low on the vine that it cracked due to the breed being very juicy. The heirlooms are pretty much done with the exception of a few, so we will see if the trend continues.


This is a little more disconcerting. It seems that there are a few La Roma's with this problem in the garden. I spent a considerable amount of time on the web researching this, and the best I can come up with is that this is the result of a Tomato Fruitworm. I have not been able to find an exact match for this look (as it seems to look on all of the afflicted fruits) but it seems to fit the general description of "boring" into the fruit. For now I am leaving it be as it seems to be afflicting a scant amount of the fruit. However, if it gets worse, I will have to take action.

I have been seen a bit of Tomato Blossom End Rot in a few of the Burpee's, but this is to be expected with a large volume of tomatoes in such a dense area. There are going to be spots that just dont dry out right as the flowers slowly converts to fruit.

I had a HUGE harvest on Monday with the girls, but am out of town until Friday and cannot post. By then I will have gotten another large one. I will update then.

Bushels O Produce

I decided to look at the Jalapeños Wednesday night after I read about the way to tell if they are ripe or not. Well, it turns out that 36 of them were ripe :) So I put on a pair of rubber gloves to protect myself from the oils which can burn, and clipped those babies off.

I also took only the absolutely ripest tomatoes off the plants as well. I have decided to let them go as long as I can since I am giving a majority of them to friends and neighbors. This way we dont waste any that don't mature quite right off the vine.


This is just a closeup of some of the Jalapeños that I picked. I took a bunch more black and whites of them as well. There is something cool about the sheen and reflection of light off the smooth peppers, but they come out looking really amazing. I will have to do an abstract day on the blog :)


The Big Boy's are starting to mature. As I was assuming, they take their time. This shot was taken Monday, and the tomato on the right is still not fully ripe. I am guessing maybe Sunday/Monday before I will be able to pick this baby. There are a few more coming too, the onslaught is about to commence.


I am still trying to get a good shot of the mess in the northeast corner of the garden where the Heirloom and the Juliet's are enmeshed, but I havent gotten a good one. This is the best shot I have. The only thing you can really tell is there isnt much to be discerned.... i.e. its a mess.

More harvesting today/tomorrow/sunday, I will update over the weekend at some point with numbers, and maybe a new dollar/cost/average.

Jalapeño and Juliet

127!! Thats how many Juliet tomatoe's Nora and I pulled out of the garden yesterday afternoon. Once again, we have a bunch more that are right there and looking to be picked in the coming days. They are ripening very quickly, and I am actually having a bit of trouble keeping up. To date I have really only lost two tomatoes to being over-ripe. I think thats pretty good, and I think its unrealistic to think that will be the max of it.


The first Jalapeño! I was actually contemplating taking 10-15 of the bigger ones off while they are green, as suggesting by several sources. While I was looking at them and decided where I was going to cut off I notice one way down on the bottom that was red. Pretty cool looking if I do say so myself. Generally its not great to leave the Jalapeños on the plant this long as they are only good for a few days, but if you plan on eating them right away, red is the hottest you can get this pepper.

Upcoming is pics of the future garden layout, and the nest of tomatoes.

New Perspective

This is the scene Saturday morning after Nora and I made a trip to the garden. There are 122 vegetables here (actually 121 and a strawberry). Whats crazier, is that I left some on the vine that were marginal, and could easily have been picked yesterday. Crazier then that is that this is off of 8 plants, where there are 16 more plants producing the same volume (taking in size consideration) of tomato.

I will be out there Monday night, and I fully expect to be taking at least 100 more tomatoes off the plants. Most of the above tomatoes are Juliets, with a few Heirlooms mixed in.


Its funny, this is 49 above, and it seems like nothing compared to the 122 up top. A quarter also worked for perspective in all of the photos to this point, but I thought the only way to get a good idea on perspective was to put a quarter AND Nora in the photo.

I havent worked out the numbers on the dollar cost average yet, but I will this week. Its dropping. Fast.