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.

Garden Update

Its been a while since the last garden update, so here is another. The biggest development is that I lost the Cucumber to some sort of disease. Here is a picture of what it looked like shortly before its death. Sorry about the poor picture quality.

Whatever disease it had attacked the leaves making brown spots all over them until the leaf died. Unfortunately there are tons of leaf diseases bacterial, viral, and fungal that can attack Cucumber leaves and to my untrained eye, the pictures that I found online of each of them look remarkably similar. I tried spraying it a couple times with a baking soda solution that seems to help with powdery mildew on the squash, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the Cucumbers.

My bean plants may also have some sort of leaf disease. Here is a picture of what some of the beans looked like a couple weeks ago.

The brown spots also spread and killed the leaves on these plants. There is a chance that it is just old age for the beans since this happened as the second harvest was winding up. I'm not to upset about the beans either way since I got quite a bit of production out of them.

The tomatoes are doing very well. One of the plants (Heirloom Old German) dramatically slowed its growth and has almost 2 dozen large tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing thats a determinate variety. Jaime already has plans to make sauce out of those. The other plant (Heirloom Isis Cherry) continues to grow like crazy and has fewer tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing that is an indeterminate variety. Some of those are starting to ripen. That plant grew up to the top of my 8' wooden poles, so I pinched off those shoots (had to use a stepladder). I'll let some lower shoots grow up to the top now. Here is what the tomatoes look like as of mid-august.

Note in the picture that the vegetation is much thicker up to about 4'. That is the height of the previous stakes that I was using to hold up the tomatoes, and I had been trying to prune the plants to keep them at that height until I got the taller stakes. Thats what I'll be doing now, except it will be up at 8' now. The 3' high tomato cages are under there somewhere, too.

I was at a farm this past weekend and I took note of the way they supported their tomatoes. They were growing in a hoop house covered in plastic. The frame of the house had poles running the length that were about 10' off the ground. There were strings running from the poles on top down to horizontal poles on the ground, making 10' tall taught strings next to each plant. The tomato plants were spiraled up the strings as they grew and that seemed to be enough support for them. Not a bad idea. I could probably do the same thing around my wooden stakes next year.

I also learned while I was at the farm that scallions and green onions really are different. Green onions are just young onions that haven't grown bulbs yet while scallions will never grow bulbs. That is something to keep in mind for next year. I have two types of seeds that I was using to make scallions. One that was labeled "bunching green onions" did stop growing when they were still really small and made bulbs. The other was labeled "spring onions", and some of those continue to grow (and are pretty good-sized) without making any bulbs.

I didn't really have much hope for the pepper plants in the spring because they started out so slowly and were way behind all the other plants. They have done very well in the hot summer weather, though. There are probably about 6 or so peppers growing on each of the 4 plants. They are a sweet pepper variety that should ripen orange. I was expecting them to be smaller than bell peppers, but the largest of them are now approaching bell pepper size and are still green.

The Zucchini plant continues to grow vigorously. Even after trimming it back a bit, it has grown to be a dense canopy at least 10' by 10'. It is called a bush variety, but it seems to be basically a viney variety with really stubby vines. Zucchini production has been somewhat sporadic, though. Many of the baby Zucchini have shriveled soon after flowering, possibly because they aren't getting pollinated well enough. This week has been good for Zucchini, though. I harvested three large ones and there are two more that will get picked in the next couple days.

The Spaghetti squash continues to be the winner of the "Which plant can take up the most ridiculous amount of space?" contest. I originally allotted 5' x 5' for it. I let it take over the melon patch after the melons didn't really work out. Then I let it take over my paths and some shady areas that I wasn't planning on planting. Then it started climbing my fence (with mixed results). Then I let it take over the potato patch. It has been trying to take over the Zucchini area, but the Zucchini is putting up a pretty good fight. The Zucchini being taller and very dense, shades the squash vines that try to wind through it. Had I planted the squash in the middle of the garden and let it go where it wanted, I am quite certain that it would completely cover the entire garden. Its hard to tell how much squash we will actually end up with because its such a tangled mess and the squashes are various sizes. I've probably seen a dozen or so squashes, a couple of which are probably around 15" long and must weigh around 5lbs each.

One of the vines that went through the potato patch kept right on going past the potatoes, over to a lilac bush, and has climbed vertically into the bush. That bush is about 20' away from the planting location of the squash vine. Its now about 8' high in the bush and showing no signs of stopping. I'm curious to see if it will make it out the top of the bush, which is about 15' high.

Finally pulled the plug on the peas

The pea plants produced one heavy crop and then a whole series of progressively smaller crops as the plants slowly die off on their own. About half the plants have died, and the other half is showing signs of old age. There hasn't been any finite end to the pea production, but it is really starting to trail off. If I let them continue I'd probably get another half pound or so, but I need the space to plant Brussels Sprouts seedlings. Time for the peas to go.

I should have taken a before and after picture, but I forgot to do that, so all I have is an after picture, and a not very good one at that. I don't know why the left side of the photo is blurry, but on the right side you can see the area where the peas used to be. I chopped up the plants a little bit and turned over the dirt, burying the pea plants in the process. Hopefully that will be extra fertilizer for the seedlings. I'll plant them in a few days.

Supposedly Brussels Sprouts like cold weather and will keep growing through heavy frosts and even into December. That cinder block wall on the right side of the picture should help to keep them a bit warm into the cold months, too. Mmm.....Brussels Sprouts.

Tomatoes and Potatoes

Those who know me well know that I don't like Tomatoes. Once they are cooked (pasta sauce, cooked salsa, etc), they're fine. Its the fresh ones that bother me. Not sure what it is exactly about the flavor, but I've never liked the flavor. Now I have another reason to dislike them. They are annoying to grow.

Jaime wanted me to grow some Tomato plants in the garden, so I have two plants that I started from seed. One is a big heirloom variety (Old German) and one is an open-pollinated small cherry variety (Isis Cherry). We also got a Topsy Turvy and a couple of heirloom seedlings to go in it from Jaime's mom. The ones in the topsy-turvy seem to be progressing fine and are starting to flower. The ones I planted in the ground are progressing more than fine.

I knew that Tomatoes aren't the sturdiest of plants, but I had a couple of 3 foot high conical tomato cages to support them. That should be good enough, right? Once it started getting warm, they began to grow rapidly and after they reached about 3 foot tall I realized it was time to put up the Tomato cages. A week later they were >4 foot and were tipping and bending the cages and threatening to fall over. I took 4 foot tall wooden stakes from the peas and tied strings to them to hold the Tomatoes up. I started to prune the new shoots so that they would stop getting taller and start making tomatoes. That didn't work so well. They are starting to grow fruit now, but they basically sent up two shoots rather than the one I had just cut. I have been literally pruning them every day to keep them in check.

Around this time, I put a few random pieces of info together and realized that Tomatoes are actually vines. They have no intention of supporting themselves and would be quite happy to fall over and grow along the ground. Not only that, but the stems will develop roots if they fall over and touch the ground.

Okay, so if they want to be vines, maybe I should let the be vines? The problem is that I have no room in the garden for them to do that. I have only allocated about 2ft X 4ft for the two plants. So maybe next year I could let them be vines if I grow Tomatoes again? A bit of internet research tells me that isn't such a good idea. Apparently the plants are less healthy and less productive if laying down, or as it was stated on one website: "By season's end, it will be an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle."

What ever happened to survival of the fittest?!? If a plant can't stand upright on its own, and can't reproduce well if it falls over, maybe it shouldn't be grown. I'm just sayin'.... At the very least, can't somebody please create a self-supporting Tomato breed?

Ok, back to the current problem. Given self-destructive 4+ foot tall tomatoes that seem to want to keep growing larger, how can I cheaply support them? Here's what they looked like this morning.

I stopped at Home Depot today and they were (of course) out of 8ft tall wooden plant stakes($5 each). I looked all around the store for a long sturdy object that could be used to replace the missing stakes. Copper pipes, steel pipes, PVC pipes, steel rebar, shovel handles, broom handles, wooden trim pieces, etc. All were either too flimsy or cost too much. I don't have the space or the desire to spend $25 each on their nice Tomato trellises. Finally, I found some 1"x2"x8' pine pieces ($2.60 each!). Together with velcro plant ties (which I highly recommend, BTW), the total cost was under $8. I had to cut the wood at angles at one end so I could pound it into the ground, but that didn't take long. The picture below shows what my support system looks like now. The Tomatoes are now free to grow upwards as much as they'd like.

Ok, enough about Tomatoes. Lets move on to a more pleasant topic like Potatoes. Here is a representative view of the Potato patch.

Recall that a mere 4 weeks ago, the Potatoes were a vigorous, 3 foot tall carpet of greenery threatening to take over other parts of the garden. Now they are a sad pile of browning leaves with a few sporadic areas of healthy-looking growth. It could be disease or maybe they are just dying off naturally because its their time. In either case, the Potato plants aren't doing much so I've started training some squash vines in that direction (right side of above picture). There are still are a couple patches where the Potatoes are growing, so before fully allowing the squash to take over, I figured I should see if there are any actual Potatoes under ground.

I've read that you can carefully dig around Potato plants by hand before they are fully done and get some baby Potatoes. I had half-heartedly tried rooting around one of the plants a couple times. I looked in a couple spots about 12" from the the stems, but didn't find anything. That seemed to be a bad sign. Today I decided to fully dig up one of the 10 plants to find out for sure whether the plants had time to make potatoes before dying off. I didn't find anything at first and I was starting to despair, but I finally hit the jackpot, right up against the stems. I found 6 respectable potatoes (all within a few inches of the stems). Now I'm excited. That was the smallest, most-shaded of the Potato plants and I still got almost 2lbs of Potatoes from it. I can't complain about that. Here are the Potatoes, fresh out of the ground. The seedlings seen in the picture are baby Brussel's Sprouts that will be transplanted into the area currently occupied by the peas in a couple weeks.

When looking at the roots, I did notice that there were several tiny baby potatoes (around 1/8"). I'm wondering if the plant was still trying to grow more Potatoes, or if that is just how it will always look. In the picture below, you can see a couple of the baby Potatoes. They are on the end of the thick roots that are closest to the stems. The other 3 thick roots used to be attached to Potatoes.

Even if the Potatoes are trying to grow a secondary smaller crop of tubers, I think I will let the squash take over, periodically harvesting the potatoes as the squash overgrows the area. The squash certainly needs the space more than the potatoes at this point. The last picture shows most of the day's harvest (there was also some beans and the tail end of the peas). Those Cucumbers are going to become pickles tomorrow.