The Return Of The Blog

I looked outside today and saw the decaying state of my vegetable garden. I harvested the last of my vegetables last week. I even harvested a Black Russian tomato that was so good it made me get all excited about this coming Spring.
I brought in one pepper plant; the Chiltepin plant. I hope I can overwinter it successfully. I will be pruning it back this week and I plan on moving it to a bigger pot --it's in a 4 gallon bucket right now. Hopefully this won't kill it.
This coming Spring I think I will only plant on 5 gallon buckets. I go back and forth on this since the tomato plants that were in the ground did better than the ones in containers, but, as it is evident right now, getting the vegetable garden ready for next year is a lot easier if all I have to do is empty the buckets, wash them, and store them away. Who knows what my final decision will be!
One thing I know for sure; I won't start my seeds in January like I did this year. I will wait until the end of February before I put any seeds into any dirt.
Come on Spring!!!!

Tiger Lilly burning bright

This Tiger Lilly grows by the front door. It's blooms every year. First one, then two, and this year, three. The plant produces bulblets that grow at the base of each leaf. I took some this year and put them in dirt. Hopefully I get some new plants that I can put somewhere in the back yard. These bulbs were planted over 10 years ago. They were planted by the original owners of this house. The plants are in a very bad spot and they still grow.

Summer continues its assault on my time. I do get to the garden but not as often as I'd like. I have harvested much and enjoyed all of it. My Sugar Baby watermelons are sweeter than ever and my Minnesota Midget canteloupes are pretty darn good too. I have eaten my fill of tomatoes, squash, peppers and now, the cucumbers began to mature. I have learned lots of stuff this season!

The return of the pollinators

I went to harvest Galina tomatoes (cherry type, yellow, low acidity) for my dinner a couple of evenings ago and found myself immersed in a sea of buzzing creatures busily going about their business and pollinating all the blooms while they were at it. Hundreds of wild beasties hovered about me and not a single one attacked me. Lots of small wild bees and other bee-like creatures formed a surreal cloud of life and it gladdened my heart that my garden, imperfect as it is, allows them to feed and live their short but so important lives.

Over and out.

Lessons learned

With Summer well upon us, I find myself with precious little time to blog. This deficiency however, does not mean that things are quiet in the garden. Oh no! Early June brought a list of bad news and new lessons to this semi-novice grower of plants.

First, the garden I had planned and the garden that came into being are two very different enterprises. The advent of my new dog forced me to change my plans midstream and to direct my efforts to mostly futile attempts to keep my puppy from destroying all growing things.
With that said, I allowed grass to grow in my onion and garlic bed which caused poor ventilation conditions. I believe this is the reason why my onions developed what I believe to be Fusarium Basal Rot. I should have taken pictures but I did not so all I can do is describe what happened to my onions. All the onions with the exposed tops appeared to have been eaten from outside in leaving hollow bulbs for me to harvest.

I will blame the grass for competing with the garlic for moisture which resulted in very small garlic bulbs.

The last thing that happened to my onions and garlic was an unintended assault by my puppy Lexie. In her efforts to get a squirrel inside the fenced area, she ran at bullet speed (witnessed by my stay-at-home neighbor)and jumped the fence landing squarely on the garlic and onions, leaving a definite dog-shaped crater in the middle of it.

So I find myself planning next year's vegetable operation already while I harvest peppers, tomatoes, butternut squash, and cucumbers.

Oh, and the weather has been hot and humid leading to blight on a couple of my tomatoes (not my hanging tomatoes which are healthy as a horse though a bit small)

I hope to return to blogging regularly with pictures.

Over and out.

Asiatic Lilly?

My neighbour gave me this plant this Spring and this is what it looks like when it blooms. My sister-in-law says that it looks like an Asiatic Lilly. This flower is so beautiful that it looks fake.
The real kicker is that it spreads like a weed. My neighbour thought these were dead so she discarded them in her yard only to find them thriving later. She dug them up and gave them to me.



And here is a bit of a mystery: I don't believe this to be Blossom End Rot because all the tomato plants were planted on the exact same soil and none of the other tomato plants are exhibiting this problem. Unless, of course, that Perestroika tomatoes have a higher need for calcium. This plant is growing in a self-watering bucket so as an experiment, I stopped filling the reservoir and began watering the plant from the top. I may be imagining things but the new tomatoes seem to be less affected by this. I will try to add lime to it tomorrow to see if the problem disappears altogether.


In other news, it's been in the 100's for the past week or so and it promises to be the same for the foreseeable future. My melon bed has grown Jurasically and the Sugar Baby vines, which are supposed to be 3-4 feet long are now close to 7 feet long! I have baby watermelon and canteloupe.
I harvested my first tub of potatoes. I got about 5 pounds out of it. Not bad.

Over and out.

First ripe tomato

The first ripe tomato of the season was picked this morning and quickly consumed. The winner is the Galina Tomato (yellow cherry type). The flavor was mild.

Second place goes to the Amateur's Dream. I picked the tomato even though it was not 100% ripe. If I was to guess, I would say that it was 85% ripe; red with no green areas although the red was not deep. I picked it because I am going out of town for a couple of days and I did not want to miss on the first red tomato of the season (really, my wife would just let it sit there, at the mercy of bug and bird!)

Sorry there are no pictures to go with this as I picked these early in the morning as I was rushing to go to work.

Over and out.

The importance of persistence.

Persistence. As humans, we need it badly. We live in a universe in flux and if we want to succeed we need to keep trying.

This is the year when I decided to jump on the re-use wagon. Mind you, I was already reusing some stuff, like my empty plastic soda bottles; but this year, I decided to do more. With that in mind, I began to collect 4 and 5 gallon buckets for my sub-irrigated containers, I scavenged for wooden pallets, and I began to think of new ways to use other stuff.
Then I ran into Peter from Wichita Rain Barrels at the Wichita Garden Show and this encounter expanded my ideas on reuse.
I originally set out to buy a rain barrel from Peter but then I decided to learn how to make one.
So I need a 55 gallon plastic barrel.

This is where the persistence comes in.

I called the local Coca-Cola bottler and they told me they only give their plastic barrels to the State of Kansas. Next I called the local Pepsi bottler; they told me to come and get one or two if they were available. I've made two trips out there (they won't tell me over the phone if they have any barrels available) to no avail. Apparently, demand for the barrels has increased dramatically. "Check with us later" the guard at the guard gate told me. And I will.

The same thing happened with the 5 gallon buckets. At first, I tried and tried and no restaurant in town would give me any buckets. I kept at it until I found a restaurant that would. Now, every two weeks or so, I go and have lunch there and come out with a few buckets in hand.

I am also trying to locate a steady supply of wooden pallets. I have gotten some here and there but I will continue to look for a place where I can get them steadily. You will be surprised how many companies pay to dispose of them.

Then there's Craiglist. I know serial killers lurk in there but there are so many cool things you can get for free!

So remember; if at first you can't get what you need for your gardening needs for free; Persist.

Over and out.

A definite lack of pollinators

Where are my pollinators? I have yet to see a bee in my garden. In years past, I've had to contend with bees, wild and otherwise, wasps, yellow-jackets, bumblebees, and a number of other winged creatures that are fond of exploring the inside of a flower.
This year? Only flies and mosquitoes.

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw a wasp exploring around the lettuce and a butterfly was hovering around the blackberry bush. That's it!

One of my neighbors has a HUGE honeysuckle bush that attracts all kinds of living things but this year I haven't seen any.

So the mystery is: What's pollinating all my veggies? Is it possible that all the fruit in my plants is the result of wind pollination?

Only the Shadow knows....

Over and out.

Tamarind

I love Tamarind pods. They are sweet and sour and I ate them often as a boy. Tamarind trees grew large in the hot sun of the Sonoran desert. A couple of years ago, I ate some pods that I bought at the store and threw the seeds into a flower pot. Some months later, I was surprised to find baby tamarind trees growing in the pots.
I've managed to keep them alive in the hopes that they will grow in a container and maybe, just maybe, give me a pod or two. Here's one of them in a pot outside loving this 90 degree weather:


Here is a picture of my only Mini-Bell bell pepper plant. I originally grew a number of these from seed but I lost all of them except for this one. Next year I won't be so careless. This picture doesn't really show the number of peppers growing on this plant.


I have baby Brandywines! Last year, I did not stake my Brandywine plants properly and I came home one day after a storm to find them broken in half. I don't remember now if I even got to eat one Brandywine tomato last year.

Here's a picture of one of my Galina tomato plants. For some reason I have 4 of these plants. I hope the tomatoes are tasty.

My melon bed got wiped out early in the Spring during all the rain we got. I replanted Sugar Baby watermelon, both Red and Yellow and Minnesota Midget cantaloupe. They are doing ok so far. Some of them even have blooms.


I continue to have trouble growing radishes to full size. This is as big as they get for me. A lot of them never grew a bulb. I've heard several theories regarding this. I will keep on trying though because I love radishes.

I checked on my rain barrels and I have two full barrels (95 gallons). Cool.

Over and out.

2 minutes of rain

Last night a thunderstorm dropped a kazillion gallons of rain in about 2 minutes and some of it managed to get into my rain barrels (yeah baby!). Right before the deluge, we got a sprinkling of pea-sized hail which sent me like a mad man into the lightning to move some of the tomato plants under the covered porch in the back of the house.

My two dogs looked at me as if I was crazy, which I was. The puppy was scared of the thunder and lightning but my old dog Bo, has seen plenty of storms and he was more interested to see if I was running out into the yard with treats in hand.

Luckily, the hail was a dud and after the super strong gale of wind that knocked power out in parts of the city and broke many tree branches, there followed a gentle rain, the kind that soaks into the ground to the merriment of plant and gardener alike.

What kind of life do people who don't garden live? Believe you me, I am beginning to develop a deep vocabulary regarding weather much like the Inuit's many names for snow. I swear to you that my sense of smell can now detect things that only dogs were privy to before. Oh, I am no superman but hanging around plants, and bugs, and air, and sun, I am becoming part of an ancient club; a club we left a long time ago but which beckon us to come back.

By the way, the Mini Bell pepper plant is LOADED with peppers. I'm just too happy for words when I find a plant like that. It surely will be planted in my garden for years to come.

Over and out.