It's That Time of Year Again....

Here we go. The aftermath of the winter and early wet spring on what was the garden last year. If you remember, I started taking out the grass around the garden in an effort to expand the garden this year. My goal is going to be to make a garden of large rectangles with a pathway around and through it all. This should allow me access to all of the spots in the garden without taking too much away.

One goal this year: Learn from what I did last year, and build on it.

Some things I learned last year:
1.There is such a thing as TOO many tomatoes : )
2.The soil here is fine if additional organic soil and peat are added, and its turned.
3.These plants are built to last, so plant them right and water them only when needed and they will do fine.
4.The hoe is your friend : )
5. Planting the same crop spaced out a few weeks will allow you a longer harvest with less volume all at one. time.

SO, yesterday I embarked on taking out the balance of the grass, and getting the land ready to be turned. I will not be doing anything to the soil that I worked last year aside from just rototilling it. Everything else will get turned, rake, and then have organic soil and peat added and rototilled again.

This is what it looked like at the end of the day Saturday. I did some more work on it this afternoon, and I am probably one full day's work away from it being ready. The landscape guy that I have used in the past is going to come by and take away all of the yard waste that I created, so I can start from scratch this year.

I will get more into what I am planning for this year, but its going to be big and diverse. I am looking forward to branching out and growing a bunch of different things as opposed to last years four items.

More to come, stay tuned......

What Once Was.....

This was July 15th. The garden was not quite full, but about as healthy as it was this year. Its an interesting cycle to plant everything, nurture it to bear fruit, and then cut it down and throw it on a pile. Its funny, it seemed like I should have left them there to fully die in the tomato cages.


But alas, everything must come to an end. All of the fruit that was slowly ripening was doing so with something wrong - mold, infestation, etc. So, in order to begin really pushing towards garden2010 I needed to be done with this. Finally, after two different days of work, I got things cut down and cleaned up. Two main observations here: Jalapenos have an incredibly woody and hearty stem and LOTS of tomatoes end up on the ground no matter how hard you try. Also, I am not sure that planting these tomatoes 4ft apart would have gotten it done. The vines were amazingly long, and intertwined with each neighboring plant in all directions. It took a lot of patience to get them out without destroying the cages in the process.

Notice: You can see garden2010 planning in effect in the foreground. I have taken all of the grass off of the part between the yard and the house, and all of the stones out of the walkway all the way to the back gate. Today I cut out the tree (more like and old honeysuckle bush) on the back fence next to the gate and I just have the back part of the yard to take up. Once I have that done I will have my landscaping neighbor haul it away, and I can begin turning all of the soil in the back.

I have been having some good thoughts on ways to set the garden up, and I think this is going to be good. I am going to be spending a lot of time out there, but I think that next year it will be easier to have the whole family out there with Astor being 2. Good times :).


And this was the aftermath. I got an entire wheelbarrow full of tomatoes and leaves that were left over when I was done. I ended up harvesting another 20 green bell peppers, and something like 50-60 Jalapenos that looked quite good. Everything else that was coming out was dying already, and the frost we had on Saturday night effectively killed any additional growth.

I am going to be taking out grass at some point this week. I will update then.

I know, I have been quiet. I have good reasons.

The garden has absolutely been in limbo for the last 6 weeks, easy. The weather has been very mild and damp. As a result, most of the tomatoes have just been chillin, no ripening and mostly just getting rotten.

I have been getting quiet a few bell and jalapeno peppers out of the garden in the interim. I stopped counting, but I want to say that I have taken at least 50 bells, and over 100 jalapenos out in the last few weeks.


Lots of the tomatoes are coming out looking like this. They are just too big, and they are starting to split at the top way before they are ripe. The good news is this doesnt ruin the whole tomato. Just slice off the top and you are good to go. I actually think the cooler weather have made the tomatoes sweeter. Not sure why, just what I was tasting.


Current pic of the garden today. The tomatoes are coming to an end. Pretty much everything left on the vine is not ripening with health. The only healthy tomatoes on the vine are ones that are green. So, I am taking them down. I started this afternoon, but it began to rain so I stopped about here:


This is how it looks right now with roughly half of the plants cut out and thrown away. They have been shedding tomatoes as I have picked them up, and I have found a few that actually look pretty good.

This is the mess left behind. A lot of what is on the left is the grass from the part of the backyard that I am currently ripping out to make room for garden 2010, but most of whats on the right side of the wheelbarrow is from the garden this summer. MESS. I am going to have most of this hauled away this year so I can start next year fully cleared and can compost properly.

I am going to get more up in the coming weeks as I start to get the rototiller out and working on the other part of the lawn. Also, all of that taller foliage in the backround of the photo above will be coming out as well. I am going to try to have everything completely bare by the first snow. Its a TON of work, but I think if I get some done every weekend, it should be enough.

Now lets just hope for no October snow (crossing fingers).

Up and Down

The weather! Its crazy! For all of the great cool wetness we had early in the year that helped my plants blow, the most recent month has been very painful for many reasons. But one main reason is that its been playing tricks on the plants.

As a result of two weeks of cool wet weather (starting 3 weeks ago), most of the tomato plants have reverted to flowering again instead of maturing fruit. SO, I have lots of new flowers on the top of the plants (Burpee's especially) and I have lots of tomatoes getting larger, but nothing ripening. What seems to happen once they do ripen is they are just too plump, and they are cracking. So, I am going to play around with taking them off the vine earlier, and trying to water a bit less (back to every 3rd day) and see if I can ride the coming warm streak (next 10 days) into some more ripening.

It may be a lost cause, but I am going to try anyway.

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 :)