Day: July 6, 2010

Tomatoes and Peppers!

The last 6 days showed a lot of growth. I am mainly going to show pictures, I am just amazed at how far things have gone in the last week. I have 4 tomatoes on 3 different plants, with a ton of blossoms. Out of my 28 tomato plants 16 or 17 have blossoms right now.

These two here are from my Golden King of Siberia plant. The biggest one is maybe an inch and a half right now.

This one here is a Cosmonaut Volkov. Another completely new one to me (though all but a few plants are new to me, so I guess that isn’t saying much).

This last one is Monomahk’s Hat (sp). This isn’t the tallest plant yet, so I was a little surprised to find a mater on it.

I also noticed 3 “megablooms” on 3 different plants. If you aren’t familiar with a megabloom, it is essentially 2 or more fused blossoms that result in a much larger tomato than the plant would normally have. These are what win contests at fairs and competitions. One was on a Pantano Romanesco (looked like 3 blossoms fused together), one was on a Carbon (looked like 2 blossoms) and I think the third one was on the Malakite, but I am not 100% sure. It was very fun to see those on the plants.

The peppers are doing quite well too. I have peppers on 7 of them now, with blossoms on most of the others.

Here is the purple jalapeno again, it probably has another inch until it reaches full size.

Here we have some Early Jalapenos. True to their name they are putting out a decent amount of peppers pretty early.

These are Tam Jalapenos (supposed to be a mild version of jalapeno, perfect for just snacking on).

This last one here is my Big Jim plant. I really wanted multiples of this plant, it tasted so good last year. Starting peppers this year was an experiment, next year I should know what I am doing and should have some actually live.

One last photo showing most of my garden and some of my cages. I hope to finish up rest of them this week. If you look at my previous post there is a lot of from last week Wednesday to today.

Growing Beauty

After going away for the weekend, I was totally delighted to come home and find some great changes to the gardens.  Namely, I actually find some marked growth on much of my plants.

The pea plant has quite a few peas- unfortunately, it’s also gotten hot and muggy which is the kiss of death for peas.  We’ll enjoy what we can get, I guess.

My butternut squash seems to have exploded!

And right below that, the pole beans are taking off.  Sprinkling them with a soap spray and then cayenne pepper did the trick.  Now I have to figure out what to do with them- they’ve reached the top of the 3-foot canes, where the pot is, and now I’m unsure what to do with them.

I was especially excited to find a blossom on my Scarlet Runner Beans.  I don’t expect much from these this year because the critters have had a field day.  But in the last few weeks, they’ve started to take off- and boy, if they would do what I want to do, we’d have beautiful blossoms followed by delicious beans

The tomatillo that I bought from the garden center has several blossoms.  This concerns me, because the one I started does not have blossoms yet- and I think they both need to be blossoming in order to achieve pollination.  But I can hope.  Next year I already know to start these plants much earlier than I did.

The strawberries are doing fantastic! I have several runners already as well as blossoms and baby fruit.

Abigail’s pie pumpkins are thriving!  We’re going to need to figure out where to send the vines in the next little while here.  All the melons the kids planted are doing well too.

Here’s Zander’s bean patch- four varieties of beans, and they are all doing really well.  Again, that soap spray and cayenne pepper has really made a difference in keeping the plants whole.

I found two of my sweet pepper plants look like they had been sat on or something while we were gone.  A little strange- but I propped them back up and we’ll see how they do.  Most of the sweet and hot pepper plants have the beginning of blossoms on them.  The one hot pepper I bought at the garden center is fruiting already.

And then there’s the tomatoes.  Before we left for the weekend, one tomato plant had generous blossoms- I was very excited about this because I have one variety of tomato I wish to save seed from- my German Red Strawberry, and that was the first to push out blossoms.  With no other blossoms nearby, if they can set fruit shortly, I won’t have to bag any blossoms or worry about cross-pollination.  Make saving the seed very easy if I just remember to save one of the very first tomatoes.

Two other tomatoes are showing blossoms now too.  The Cosmonaut Volkov and Brave General are bearing open blossoms- and it looks like more plants are on the way.  I was a little disappointed that my tomato harvest may be late this year, but I’ve decided it’s actually a great thing, because I won’t have to worry about everything ripening while we’re on our annual camping vacation.

I went out this afternoon and sprinkled the tomato and pepper patch with a general 30-30-30 granular fertilizer.  I just sprinkled it around the plants, and later when it rains the rain will carry the fertilizer to the roots.

I will say that I am impressed with the tomato plants themselves.  They were so scrawny and spindly when I planted them, but now they all have nice and sturdy strong stems.  The winds and breezes we’ve had have really toughened up the plants.  I’m grateful for this- it gives me time to think on my plan for trellising the plants.