Garden Thread

No tomatoes on either of my plants yet, but they seem to be doing well. I've been adding crushed eggshells from whenever I cook to the soil and making sure that they don't get rained on too heavily. I suppose I should start seeing the flowers by the end of the month - at least, I hope so! My Anaheim pepper plant has several buds! I really need to get a support for it this weekend.

I have two jalapeno (actually technically jalafuego) pepper plants.  One has yielded rocket-hot peppers.  The other one has peppers with no heat at all.  Man, plants are weird!  (They'll get nicely averaged out when they get brine-pickled all together in one jar.)

This past Saturday night I put up 8 half-pints of shishito to give away to friends. First time canning and all of them sealed. Once the weather gets cool and I don't mind having the stove on for hours I'll cook some frozen tomatoes down to sauce and paste.

Tomato season is almost done. The Sun Golds will keep trickling out as long as it stays hot, and there's a couple green slicers left. The peppers and butterbeans are on their last gasps; maybe they would have lasted longer if it had rained some time in the past month. Eggplants and okra were the disappointment this year, plenty of strong-looking plants but few fruit. It's probably time to re-fertilize the whole plot.

Sigh.

One of my tomato plants got caught in the rain before I could drag it under the roof overhang and drowned. The other one has been growing and growing, but still no fucking tomatoes! I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I keep it pruned the way a friend showed me, it gets adequate water and sunlight and nutrition, it has a sturdy cage.

My Anaheim pepper plant was tragically broken during a violent thunderstorm, but it's bounced back and I have a good ten peppers growing. I got a pepper from it about two weeks ago and it was good and proper hot - I try not to water it more than necessary, because I read that pepper plants grow hotter peppers when they're a bit stressed. I'm not sure what I'll do with the peppers from this batch. Probably make some salsa and freeze it or pickle them or something like that.

Started some mint, parsley, and basil seeds about a month ago in these little organic kits my mom found on sale somewhere. The parsley has done nothing and I suspect those seeds are just a bust, the basil has one lone tiny sprout, and the mint (predictably) is growing like a mother.

I do need to start getting some decent pots to bring the herbs inside, as the lemon balm plastic pots are seriously cracked and so is the one holding my petra croton, a tropical plant that I bought at about four inches high and which is now growing into a lovely monster of a plant. My succulents remain indoors and I am pleased to say that Spiny Bob and Louise, the cactuses, are doing great. Floppy the succulent keeps losing leaves and I'm not sure why. I don't move it around and I don't water it too much or too little and it gets plenty of sun. I suspect Floppy won't be with me too much longer.

Garden 2019 is completed, finally.  We did the last of the clean-out yesterday, after putting it off for a while for reasons.  

Garden 2020 is started, at last!  After emptying out the last of the giant catnip hedges that overtake some of the pathway in the garden at the end of each season, we planted the garlic and shallots to overwinter. 

And now my work is done until January when we start the onion seeds indoors.  I think this feeling is as good as the one you get when spring finally arrives and you get to fill the garden with greenery -- I'll be hankering badly for that come March, but right now there's so much to be said for the tranquility in the empty garden, all browns and grays with a couple of the beds covered up with straw and tucked away for the winter.  It feels cozy and safe and complete, and now we start the two restful months of the gardening year.  I love it!

I am eagerly awaiting the first freeze here to kill off my tomatoes for good. I picked two pounds today. It's ridiculous.

Last weekend I took three gallons of sun gold tomatoes out of the chest freezer and cooked them down to a half-gallon of tomatoes paste, and it is amazing.

Onions have sprouted!  We have liftoff!

Whoa!  That's a bummer about the plant itself, but also really cool from a "cool things happen when you garden" kind of way.

I saw an interesting post on Instagram from a small seed-saving retail operation.  Apparently their business has gone WAY up this spring, with people worried about food sourcing and having enough time on their hands to take up gardening.  This small company (one I don't use and actually had never heard of, but one of my regular sources had re-posted it) was saying that they normally have more seed than they sell, but that won't be the case this year.  And they don't have time now, because they're so busy filling orders, to be setting up their own planting infrastructure for the season.  So they were advising their customers to start thinking now about doing their own seed-saving this season, because there will likely be significant shortage next year.  I have no idea whether this is something to be cognizant of with regards to the companies I order from, which are all bigger operations, but still.  This could be an interesting garden-specific effect of all of this.

In my own garden news, I think we're going to transplant our onions into the garden next weekend!  And we had 100% germination of our garlic and shallots this spring, so my allium situation is solid!

The only luck I've ever had keeping unwanted creatures away from my plants has been to wrap the plants in all kinds of fencing.  And that can be kind of hit-or-miss -- nothing like spending a fall morning locking down the garden with new rabbit fencing, and then coming out in the spring to discover yet another nest of baby bunnies inside the fence!    Does something like chicken wire keep raccoons out?

That weeding tool is so cool!  I'm a caveman of a gardener, where if I can't achieve something with my bare hands, it doesn't get done.  I haven't evolved to even simple tools, let alone complex ones like that.

We should!  My lawn is, like, 5% actual desirable grass, and 95% indeterminate things that look green when mowed to a uniform height.  And then I walk through the neighborhood and see what it looks like where my neighbors made efforts to make their lawns look nice, and I sigh wistfully... but hey, it's biodiversity in my yard, right?

It's been such cold weather, my seedlings haven't even gotten an overnight on the deck. And then when the sun is shining it's all +15 mph wind. Our seedlings never go in the ground until late May anyway, but it's so unpleasant out I haven't even put the bean seed out.