Tomato Harvest

As I mentioned in one of the earlier posts, one of the tomato plants in the garden is an indeterminate variety and keeps slowly producing tomatoes. The other one apparently is determinate because it started growing all its tomatoes at the same time and didn't make any more flowers after that. Jaime has been wanting to make tomato sauce once the tomatoes from that plant ripen. A few had begun to trickle in over the past week, but it looked like the majority needed another week or so to fully ripen. Unfortunately, late blight has caught up to the tomatoes on that plant and have started to blight a few of the actual tomatoes and not just the foliage. In order to save what I could, I harvested all the tomatoes off that plant.

They might look like they are a ways from being ripe, but this variety is supposed to be marbled orange and red when fully ripe, so most of them are pretty close. That is about 11lbs of tomatoes. The smaller ones on top are a few cherry tomatoes from the other plant. We still have a few pounds from tomatoes that we had picked earlier, so we've got more than enough to make sauce with.

Potatoes

When I first dug up potatoes in mid-july, I found quite a lot of them. Since I knew we wouldn't be able to use them all quickly, I decided to leave most in the ground, hoping that they would keep well there. They are a thin-skinned red kind and not meant for long-term storage. We've gotten several shares of potatoes from the CSA between then and now, so we had no need for more potatoes. We finally burned through the CSA potatoes, so I dug up a couple plants from the garden yesterday. Here is what the potatoes looked like.

Not too shabby. A couple of them are rather calloused, but nothing to complain about. They are certainly in a lot better shape than most things would be after being buried in dirt for two months! I'm sure that you avid Miller Homestead followers recall that I was considering whether to thin out my potato plants or just let them grow. I thinned one row to 2-3 stems per tuber, while leaving all the 4-6 stems per tuber in the other row. I harvested one plant from each row yesterday, and though its a small sample size, you can see the difference. The bottom pile is from the thinned row and produce fewer, larger potatoes, while the non-thinned row produced more, smaller potatoes. That matches up with what the internet told me to expect. There is slightly more weight in the non-thinned potatoes, but not by a lot. Its hard to tell from the pic, but those two larger ones weigh a lot. Next year, I'll probably try to plant with somewhat fewer eyes (each eye sprouts one or more stems) per chunk of potato, but I won't thin them at all.

Since I was too lazy to post a pic of the garden in my garden update post, here is one.

The picture doesn't show everything because its too cramped to be able to see it all without a fish-eye lens, but you get the idea. The remains of the spaghetti squash can be seen on the left side and right side (where I let it grow through the old potato patch). Zucchini in the front. Broccoli is the blueish leaves in the middle with tomatoes behind that. You can just see the Brussells Sprouts plants starting to grow in the back along the wall. Pepper plants in the back right.

Which vegetables take up the most time?

I expected the garden to take up time this summer, but some of the crops took up more of my time than others. I'd guess that I probably spent about 3-5 hours per week on average. Here is a list of crops I grew this year, ranked from least time consuming, to most time consuming.

1. Onions: Not much to it, plant them, do a little weeding, yank them out of the ground, dry them.

2. Potatoes: Plant....harvest. If they didn't have to be dug out of the ground at harvest, they would be #1.

3. Leafy Greens: Not much work here, either. Did have to do some thinning and hilling up dirt to keep them upright.

4. Peppers: Had to do a little bit of staking the plants and branches to keep them from falling/bending over under the weight of the peppers.

5. Broccoli/Kohlrabi: Had to check often for aphids and spray for them periodically.

6. Beans: Just a matter of picking them, which is not terrible, but takes 10 min every other day for a month or so during harvest time.

7. Zucchini: Occasional harvesting, occasional spraying for powdery mildew, occasional pruning.

8. Ground-planted tomatoes: Requires occasional harvesting, periodic staking up, and frequent pruning.

9. Spaghetti Squash: Frequent spraying for powdery mildew, occasional pruning and harvesting

10. Topsy-turvy tomatoes: Just a matter of (quick) daily watering and frequent fertilizing

11. Peas: Putting in supports, training them up supports, and time-consuming picking made peas the most time-consuming crop of the year. 20 minutes of searching through vines to find peas every other day during harvest season really gets annoying after the first couple weeks. That doesn't even include the time it takes to trim the stems off (they were snow peas, shelling peas would be even worse) before eating. Its a shame the peas grew so well and tasted so good, because I'm tempted to not grow them next year due to the time it took to pick them.

Late Summer Garden Update

Its been a while since the last garden update, and I was going to make a really big post with lots of pictures, but then I got lazy. You probably wouldn't have wanted to read a really long post anyway.

August is supposed to be the month with tons of produce. Here at the Miller Homestead, it seemed to be the month of disease. After a prolonged battle, the Spaghetti squash has basically succumbed to a combination of Powdery Mildew and something else (possibly gummy stem blight). The Zucchini is pretty well covered in Powdery Mildew as well, though it seems to only be slowing it down rather than killing it off. The tomatoes are having problems with late blight, but the soil planted tomatoes are doing better than the ones in the topsy-turvy. The broccoli and kohlrabi have bad infestations of cabbage aphids. I'm keeping that in check with pyrethrin spray now, and the plants seem to be doing ok.

Despite the diseases, we have been getting some produce. Cherry tomatoes and paste tomatoes have been harvested. A couple of green bell peppers have been harvested. None of the peppers have turned the orange that they are supposed to, even though one started to rot on the plant. Sporadic Zucchinis, or course. We ate a couple of moderate sized spaghetti squashes. There are another 13 squashes of varying sizes and ripeness laying all around the garden; hopefully the unripe ones will still ripen even though the plant is basically dead. We've also eaten a few Kohlrabis. Basically, they are Broccoli stems, maybe with a slightly more cabbagy flavor. In case you haven't seen on, below is a picture of one. The picture is not from my garden (I told you this was a lazy blog post).

Not so sure I'd grow kohlrabi again. I think I'd rather have cauliflower or more broccoli or something.

There is still a good amount of stuff growing in the garden. We'll probably get tomatoes, peppers (green apparently), and Zucchini for the next month or so. Some of the spring planted broccoli looks like its just now starting to think about growing heads. I think they must have gone semi-dormant over the summer. Brussells sprouts have been transplanted, and I've also recently planted fall crops of Lettuce, Pak Choi, Arugula, and Green Onions (from bulb sets). Most of the potatoes are still in the ground, too. We have more than enough potatoes, and I'm hoping they'll keep well in the dirt till fall.