the wilt, the wilt, enough with the wilt

Aren’t hobbies supposed to be relaxing or something?  I’m kinda stressed out about these tomatoes.  The wilt is gaining ground.  Tomatoes are ripening, but I want them to go faster so they ripen before the wilt kills the plants.  The blondkopfchen cherry tomatoes are ripening – they are so delicious, just as good as sun gold (but open-pollinated). But about that pollination – I’ve only got one of these plants.  But I’ve never seen so many blossoms on one tomato plant.  If each one had produced a tomato, there would be enough from this one plant to feed the whole neighborhood.  But they didn’t set fruit, due to disease, or the bees, or whatever.  There are not so many.  The black krims are getting some color on them, but I’m ready for ripe tomatoes.  The venerable Kathy Clancy from the BUG garden says to try epsom salts for wilt, so I did.  I sprinkled some on the tomatoes and also on my sad fava beans.  The interweb doesn’t seem too encouraging about epsom salts helping with wilt, though.  Apparently it helps with blossom end rot, which is not what I’ve got.  Not this year, anyway.  But apparently epsom salts don’t hurt and are also useful for soothing baths and constipation. 

So yeah the thing killing the fava beans looks to probably be the same wilt, and it looks like beans in the BUG garden have also got mosaic virus.  My swedish brown beans show signs of both, but they are healthy and vigorous anyway, and making lots of beans, hooray!  Other people’s tomatoes in the BUG garden do look like they’re coming down with the wilt as well, although not as bad as mine.  Now I think the difference is probably the temperature (it’s hot up on the roof) and the varieties.  They are probably growing more disease resistant tomatoes than me, is all.

It’s hot.  hot.

Hooray! I actually grew something!!

Check it out, it’s my garlic harvest!  I pulled up the garlic today out of the Oakdale garden, and none too soon.  I think this is the first time I have actually brought home anything out of my garden in any real quantity.  There are a couple of runts in here, but more real big head of garlic, most of them are not quite as big as the ones I get from the farm, but big enough to make me happy!! I braided them (a good trick, as they are hard-neck garlic) and hung them under cover on the front porch. 

The fava bean harvest has been a little less successful:

This is basically my whole harvest of fava beans.  I picked and ate another handful, smaller than this one, today (the first one was 7/12).  Even though the plants were big and healthy looking for a while there, now their leaves are getting yellow and brown.  There were lots of flowers on them, but they didn’t make beans, they turned black and shriveled instead.  The beans that did develop are often misshapen and covered in black spots (although the beans inside the pods were still OK).  So sad!  There are still aphids on them, and those tiny little jumping cricket like things.  I actually wonder if I could have damaged the flowers by spraying for the aphids.  I sprayed them with a solution of Dr. Brommer’s soap, and I remember they had flowers on them when I did, but I didn’t really try to avoid the flowers. 

In other news, the onions are looking OK – it will be my best effort yet for onions, but still not quite up to my expectations.  The greens on my onions never did really get big enough – maybe too much time in the small pots, too late going into the ground.  They are forming bulbs now, and some are pretty healthy looking, but none look like they’re going to be really big, and some are still teeny babies.  The shallots look good – actually I’m wondering if I should pull them.  But their tops aren’t brown yet and I’m assuming you treat them the same as onions.  The swedish brown beans are doing well in the BUG garden.  Hopefully that will be a success.  The corn is growing, and it’s just barely ahead of the scarlet runner beans, which some of them have found a will to live and have started vining up the corn plants.  Hopefully something good will come of that. 

In the Oakdale garden, I now have a crazy mishmash of all kinds of beans.  I’ve been planting them over and over again, and the squirrels have been eating them relentlessly, but each time I plant them again some survive, and now it looks like the space will be reasonably full of beans.  In addition to a lot of soybeans (the original planting was from seeds I saved from plants I grew from seeds I think from High Mowing, the later plantings were of soybeans I got in the CSA last year), there are just a few survivors of Jacob’s Cattle beans, which were the ones I really wanted to grow, some black turtle beans, and a new addition, some speckly cranberry beans.  Those came from my friend Anne’s farm in Asheville – she gave them to Arik last year for Christmas.  Since then they’ve been sitting in a cloth bag in our pantry, and the other day he pulled them out to find them infested with bugs.  I mean really crawling with bugs.  They were definitely not salvagable for eating, almost every bean had maggots in it, but I managed to find some I was willing to plant.  Not many, it was gross.  But the ones I did plant are coming up pretty well.

Around the house, the herb garden is recovering.  I still haven’t sowed new plantings of cilantro and parseley, gotta get around to that.  And my basil is still in 3" pots, eek.  The tomatoes are showing definite signs of disease, but I’m hopefully they will cough up some fruits for us before they go.  Eggplants are not as big as they should be, but they’re making flowers.  I wonder if I should hand pollinate them to be sure getting fruits.  There are a lot of flowers on the tomatoes not making fruit, and it could be the disease they’ve got, or maybe the bee blight that’s going to kill us all if the oil peak doesn’t first….  I ate the very first cherry tomato off the blondkopfchen plant – really good!  Not unlike sun gold, as promised.  Peppers are also small – the plants haven’t got much bigger, but they’re making peppers, which is nice of them.  The paprika peppers are making bigger fruits than it even looks like they can support on their puny little bodies.  Cayenne peppers, not so much.  In the backyard, the broccoli is over.  I managed to produce a couple of measly, tiny little heads of broccoli that didn’t taste that good.  Even so, it has been my best year yet for broccoli.  It’s a little late, but maybe I’ll still try a fall crop.  Yellow beets back there are actually looking pretty good.  Apparently the thing to do about leaf miners is to wait them out.  I should sow another crop of those too.  Beets, not leaf miners. 

And on the fruit watch:  gooseberries are done, some raspberries are done, others are still working.  Peaches, apples, and grapes are ripening.  The backyard blackberries are just getting started – there is a going to be a huge crop of these this year.  There are a lot more berries than most years, but they’re a little smaller than usual. 

peppers in, finally, good looking tomatoes and last year’s basil

Finally potted my peppers up into their bigger pots, really late.  They weren’t too badly rootbound, but they’re way behind now (I started these the same time as the tomatoes!).  Now we wait and see if they will get any bigger and/or make any peppers.  The smaller ones are cayenne, the larger ones are paprika.  Grow, babies. 

Now check this out!  So far, success with the tomatoes!  They look better than in any other year….

And I finally chopped down the last of last year’s basil.  The one on the left has just been shorn, the one on the right is about to get it.  These two scraggly plants made a lot less basil than I thought they would!  But they had a good life. 

Herb garden massacre

Stupid landlord.  I used to do the landscaping for my house, they even used to pay me.  But my stupid next-door neighbor, who pays thousands of dollars for professional landscapers to do her "property" (stupid "property") complained that my landscaping was not up to her standards.  So my landlord fired me, and now he sends around the very cheapest workers he can get, same as he does with all the house maintenance, to mow the lawn and trim the hedges.  I live in fear of what they might do to my plants.  And yesterday my fears were realized.  A landscaper was here with his two kids, one with a leaf blower, the other with a weed-whacker!  And they weed-whacked my herb garden nearly straight down to the ground.  Grrr. 

Bat poop, and waiting for the wilt

So I replanted my beans in the Oakdale garden – half black beans, and half soybeans.  Hopefully the squirrels have lots of other things to eat by now and will leave them alone.  It has not rained significantly in a good while and my re-planted black beans have not had enough water since I put them in.  Only a few are up. 

I dug down deeper next to the garlic and found that yes, they are bulbing, thank goodness.  I think I will actually have some garlic. 

Sour cherries are just barely past their peak.  I really wish I liked cherry pie, because there are enough cherries for about 200 cherry pies.  Red and champagne raspberries are starting to come out, they are awesome.  The blackberries in my backyard – oh my god I have never seen that many berries before.  Most years we manage to just eat the berries fresh off the bush, but this year there will have to be jam.  And cobbler. 

I harvested the main head off my one surviving broccoli plant in the backyard.  It was a pretty puny little head for such a huge plant.  And kind of bitter.  I fed it to my roommates in the salad at our house meeting.  I’m hoping for side shoots.  Also I harvested the bok choi because it was about to bolt – right now it’s just in the fridge, not eaten yet.  Yellow beets are mostly concentrating on being devoured by leaf miners, not making beetroots at the moment, maybe never. 

I finally pulled it together to get those sweet potatoes planted:

Very late in the season, we’ll see if I get any potatoes out of them.  Check out my planter!  I have always been on the lookout for big pots, but have not come across anything big enough for potatoes.  So I tried going down to the big Super K-Mart in the South Bay strip mall.  And found out that the South Bay strip mall has like quintupled in size and there is no more Super K-Mart.  But there is a Target, and there I found this enormous bin, meant for storing all your other shit you get at Target.  It’s the biggest shit bin they had, 45 gallons worth.  I got two, they were like 13 bucks each, same as the 20" pots at Home Despot.  I cut some drainage holes near the bottom, and put some bricks and rocks down there, with some seed trays on top to hold the dirt up off the soggy bottom, and filled one of these up with the best potting soil ever.  If these poor abused sweet potato slips are going to make any new potatoes, they’re going to do it here. 

The wilt is coming….

So far my tomatoes look great.  They are up on the porch roof, all leafed out with lots of green tomatoes forming.  The Brandywines, as usual, are the canaries in the coal mine.  Their lower leaves started to get yellow and brown edges, and I pulled them off – not because I really think that will halt the wilt, but because I get depressed looking at it.  But basically the whole plant has got these subtle purplish-red spots on the leaves, which I expect will develop into full-blown tomato-killing disease, same as every year.  My strategy this year, and so far it’s looking pretty good, is to grow plants to healthy and vigorous that they manage to make some tomatoes before the wilt gets them.  I’m trying to race the tomato diseases.  So far, my drought-protection measures are working really well!  The 20" pots seem just the right size, and I think I’m becoming a big fan of the Terra-Sorb.  Some combination of those two things, plus perhaps some more attentive roommates than in years past, has made this the best looking crop of porch tomatoes yet.  If I can actually eat some tomatoes off the plants this year, that would be huge. 

Peas are producing about the handful I predicted of each kind.  They are very delicious, just very few.  I have started planting parsley where they were supposed to be. 

I finally got the eggplants potted up into their big containers and up on the roof – ditto a couple of cayenne peppers (they and the paprika peppers were starting to flower already in their little pots).  Still a lot of potting up to do!  Yesterday Arik and I went to the BUG garden and absconded with what I hope will be the last batch of compost I’ll need to fill the rest of those containers.

And speaking of that compost!  Tonight I was at the BUG garden feeding my spindly yellow-looking corn with some bat poop I found tucked away in one of the many nooks and crannies of my larger-than-life house (it’s been sitting there since before I moved here 4 years ago).  I was talking with Susan, who was telling me people in the garden were saying it’s possible to put too much compost on your garden, since it may not be quite finished decomposing, and if it’s not, it can actually subtract nutrients from your plants, not add them.  Well, that made a certain amount of sense to me, considering I just added about 8 inches of that very compost to my garden, and the nitrogen-loving plants, the corn and beans, are looking a little yellow.  So I gave them some bat poop and we’ll see what happens. 

And with that little cliff hanger, good night.