Rants from the Hollow

I didn’t quite make my goal of a May tomato, but we’ve been in pretty good shape for the last 6 weeks, and there are still some varieties that haven’t contributed to the salad bowl. The photo above shows Early Girl, Glacier, Dr Carolyn, Grape and the big one on the right is my first Brandywine.

I started my seeds indoors during the first week of March. I planted half my seedlings, including a purchased Big Girl, about April 10, and then planted the rest a couple of weeks later. There continues to be a significant size difference between the ones that were transplanted so early, and the ones planted later.  As it turned out, the last frost date was very early this year, and I could have planted them earlier. The unseasonably hot weather over the last 6 weeks slowed down product, resulting in some fruit drop long before some plants were close to having ripe tomatoes.

Early Girl: To get fruit as soon as possible, Elizabeth brought me a very solid and healthy seedling from Merrifield Garden Center.  It has been a solid producer of tasty fruit since early June. I’m guessing that the seedling was planted in February, because it was significantly bigger than my seedlings.

Dr. Carolyn: This lemony-tasting (and looking) cherry tomato has consistently provided handfuls of tasty tomatoes since mid June.

Grape: I bought this one from a local nursery as a replacement for my only fatality. Pickings were slim, and this plant was much too leggy when I bought it. It has provided a small amount of fruit, but looks to be almost tapped out at this point.

Glacier: This is the earliest-fruiting of the heritage tomatoes that I started from seed. It was the 2nd plant to provide ripe fruit, but the small and solid fruit are not as tasty as the Early Girls.  The first fruit were quite watery, although taste and texture has improved. Lately, it has suffered from a lot of split fruit.  It doesn’t seem really comfortable with the hot weather.

Brandywine: Reputedly one of the tastiest varieties, this heritage tomato hasn’t impressed me, yet. The first seedling I planted is the only plant in the garden to suffer from blossom end rot.  I mulched all the early fruit from this one because they were obviously not turning out well. The plant is doing better, but I had to throw away another very large fruit today.  The 2nd plant, which has a lot more sunlight, is ahead in fruit production, with no sign of end rot.  I think Sheryl harvested 1-2 during the second week of July, but I didn’t get one until July 18. It was tasty, but not noteworthy.

Mortgage Lifter VFN: I didn’t get one of these planted in the first batch.  A huge tomato is almost ripe, but it is so close to the ground that I’m concerned about rodents.  Looks like there is more to come.

Long Keeper: I planted two of these with the idea that we’d be able to store some of them in the Fall.   There are a few fruit, and I expect them to ripen over the next couple of weeks.

Old German: Hello?  What are you waiting for?

Summer, which came unusually early this year, represents a shifting of gears in the vegetable garden. The delicate tastes of spring greens are replaced by the more robust impact of hot weather reds and yellows. Both through more carefully planning and the accidents of weather, this year’s garden managed to simultaneously provide lettuce and tomatoes.  I composted the last of the lettuce and spinach this week.

Although my wall of peas continued to flourish, June saw a significant reduction in sweetness and flavor. I pulled them down before they’d completely finished flowering, and planted Waltham Butternut and Green Striped Cushaw winter squash in their place.  Those have sprouted, and I’ll put up a couple trellis for them tomorrow.

I’ve been surprised by how some plants have flourished, while others have struggled. Before summer had even started, it had become clear that I’d ended up with a tomato thicket.  On the left of Kirk, you see the tomatoes I planted in early April, 2 weeks earlier than normal. The set of tomatoes on the right side of the photo were also started from seed in early March, but I planted them 2 weeks later.

The Early Girl, which Elizabeth bought for me at Merrifield, has done phenomenally well, with the first tomato arriving during the 2nd week of June. At this point, its providing a couple tasty fruit every day. Glacier has started fruiting, but I don’t think they have much taste. Both Dr Carolyn’s have started providing a small but steady supply of delicate yellow cherries with an almost lemony overtone.  The Brandywine on the left should have had ripe fruit by now, but they all suffer from some sort of end rot. The other Brandywine looks to be in good shape, but its 2 weeks later, so its hard to tell. Radiator Charley is still a week or two from ripeness, and the two Old Germans have pretty flowers, but I’m not sure if they’ve even set fruit, yet.   Its been so hot lately that all of them stopped setting fruit, which doesn’t usually happen until a couple months later in the season.

I’ve got 2 kinds of lima one of which is well over the top of the trellis, with the more delicate Willow Leaf tentatively topping it a couple days ago.  A hybrid bush lima and a bush green bean are both doing well now, after withstanding a couple weeks of grazing.  The Cornfield green beans have turned into a leguminous green wall, but unlike the Christmas limas, show no signs of flowering.

I’m mostly finished with my first attempt at potatoes, an exercise that was mostly successful.   Digging up taters is like finding Easter eggs, a form of mystery lacking with most other vegetables.  I plan on starting a fall crop next month, but the left over seed potatoes, moldering in a cool dark corner of the basement, are looking tired.  Some of the potato tubers I dug this week were trying to start new plants, so I just stuck them back into the ground, and maybe they’ll do better than the well-sprouted seed potatoes I’ve been saving downstairs for the second planting.

I’ve had mostly positive experiences so far with the squash family.  We’ve picked about 6 pounds of yellow crookneck, a favorite courgette of ours that we never found in Europe.  The vine borers have been out in force, though, and I’ve had to pull out several squash plants, and perform surgery on some of my pumpkins.  Pumpkin patch #1, taking over the former mulch pile in a clearing where a pine tree was downed, is mostly thriving, in spite of the occasional groundhog attack and some insects.  Big max has set several of its distinctively pale and ugly fruit, and one of the others, I’m not sure if it’s Jack O’Lantern or the pie pumpkin, has multiple dark green orbs that are approaching the size of bowling balls.  Patch #2, a pair of Big Maxes, is struggling, and has only set one pathetic little pumpkin. I try to remain organic, but a neighbor gave me a bottle of some sort of insecticide powder that I’ve liberally sprayed all over the base of the pumpkins.

This week I planted some more corn, fall cabbage, and, because you can never have too much zucchini, another yellow crookneck. I’m not confident that the 3 remaining plants, 1 of which has had borer removal surgery, will make it through the summer. Making up for 10 years lost time in my garden, I’ve sifted a dozen bushels of composted manure into the garden.

Apparently to no purpose, I had spread about $25 worth of imported Swedish pigs blood around my garden in the form of pellets. To be fair to the manufacturer, while they did claim to repel mice and moose (elk), the package said nothing about the American member of the Marmot family.  Hopefully, the cucurbitae and pulses will no longer have anything to fear, with today’s capture of Little Chuck in the charitably named Havahart trap.  I can’t imagine why he even wandered into the thing.  I don’t even remember when I last baited it with pear slices and peanut butter. After some debate over the most discrete way to euthanize our little weather forecaster, Elizabeth volunteered to treat him to a $25 permanent visit  to the pound, leaving with the smelly thing chattering away in the back of my Subaru.

After the biggest snowfall on record, and a last frost date that came at least a month early, last Friday brought the gnarliest-looking hailstones I’ve ever seen.

They were described as ‘quarter sized’ by the weather service. It’d be an exaggeration to say ‘golf ball sized’, but a number of the stones were flat and bumpy, and about the same size as sliced golf balls. The spherical stones were smaller, about the size of shooter marbles.

The storm made a huge racket, and lasted for several minutes, leaving the yard littered with ice balls and fallen debris.

Outside of a couple tomato and potato leaves, the garden came through the storm intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my Subaru.

We’ve seen some unusual weather since returning to the US, and the unseasonably hot & dry spring probably accounts for the failure of the lambs lettuce and spinach crops. Presuming that the mild spring would last, I planted some tomatoes and squash two weeks early, and as it turned out, I could have planted them a couple weeks earlier than that.  This being my first year back in the garden, it was too much of a mess to start planting the first week of March (my excuse is that I was waiting until the pine trees came down), but even if I’d wanted to, there was still snow on the ground.

I wonder what summer is going to bring.

Spring came early this year, it has been uncharacteristically hot, we are 3 inches below our normal rainfall, and now I’m wishing that I’d taken advantage of global warming a couple weeks earlier than I did.

I did plant some tomatoes a couple of weeks before what is normally considered the last Spring frost date. Most of my tomatoes are open pollinated heritage varieties, started from seed during the first week of March.  I’ve got one hybrid, an Early Girl that Elizabeth bought me in the nursery, which I aggressively planted in early April. Close to 3′ tall, she started setting fruit last week, with the first tomato about 1.5″ in diameter right now.

She’s flanked by the first of 4 of the ones I started from seed.  Under black paper ‘mulch’ and surrounded by 5′ cages, they are thriving in this hot and sunny spring, and Old German should start blooming any day now.

A pair of ground cherries can be seen on the left. I started them at the same time as the tomatoes, and their growth has been painfully slow.  I don’t know how big they will eventually get, but I’m assuming they will not become as big as a tomato, even though they are related.

Two weeks ago, which was two weeks after planting the first group of tomatoes, I decided that all danger of frost was past, and the second group of heritage tomatoes went in.  Also planted under black paper, they are currently only about half the size of the first group.  The plant density is a little bit on the high side, but with a plot of potatoes going in this year, I didn’t want to complicate rotation over the next couple of years by sprinkling nightshades all over the garden.  I also didn’t want to throw anything away, so I planted all of my indoor starts, which was 2 of everything but one of the Mortgage Lifters, which suffered an unfortunate re-potting accident.

This is the first time I’ve tried potatoes, but after what seemed like a very slow start, the 4×4 plot in the back is filling up nicely with 4 different varieties.

The plot I started the first week of March is doing well.  I’ve been snacking on 2 different kinds of radish for a couple of weeks.

The sugar snap peas have been blooming for a couple days, and I snacked on a couple of early pods yesterday.  I decided a couple of days ago to start harvesting lettuce, and now it is looking like it might bolt before I can finish it.

The adjacent plot has some arugula that has been doing great, but that hardy green is flanked by two pathetically feeble attempts to grow lambs lettuce. Rapunzel, let down your roots! Incredibly slow to germinate, neither the Vit nor Green Jade are anything to brag about.  The peas in the back are traditional English garden peas, which look healthy enough, but haven’t started to bloom yet, and I’m concerned about the heat.

My third 4×4 of greens is doing even worse.  It has been 5 weeks since I planted the first 8-10 squares, and so far, my germination rate is awful.  Unlike the early March plot above, I’d very carefully fluffed up and composted this one.  The chicken wire was in place from the beginning, keeping out the birds, and I put a cardboard shield across the top whenever it stormed.  I’ve regularly hand-watered this lovely little plot to keep the seeds moist, and there is precious little to show for all that attention. So much for trying to keep a fresh supply of lettuce throughout the Spring.  I think I’ll need to shade these plants soon.

I started 4 squash plants at the same time as my tomatoes. I know that squash don’t always transplant well, but I wanted to get a jump on the season with some of the yellow squash that Elizabeth and I prefer over green zukes.  I put two plants out at the same time as the first set of  tomatoes, and put Reemay over the top to keep the borers away.  I’m not sure they liked being under spunbonded poly, and the other plant died of stem failure (NOT borer damage).  This plant had some damage to the stem also, but seems to be doing much better, and has visibly grown in the 2 days since I took this picture. Today it has a very distinct female bud and a male bud that might bloom tomorrow.