It is always amazing to me when cucumbers, beans, squash, tomatoes, and eggplant seem to grow full sized and ripen overnight! We are really enjoying the Diva cukes (in fact, Sue canned 6 pints of Bread and Butter pickles on Saturday)....we are eating summer squash with every dinner or lunch - to us, best steamed until tender with a little butter and some chives. The bag of green beans in our fridge is now reduced to one serving, because I decided to freeze a gallon bag today. Yet, tomorrow there will be more of everything to pick! One of my bean rows is looking a bit rough, so tomorrow I plan to pull them out, redig the row and do another planting.
As far as the driveway menagerie of pots, there is always work to be done. Right now, I am watching closely for advancing disease in the tomatoes. Each morning I walk the patch and remove damaged foliage - yet even given that, some plants will soon be on life support. No matter - the objective for me (with so many projects running in the garden) is one ripe fruit for evaluation and seed, and even the worst looking plants have plenty of fruit that should ripen. I am continuing to remove dead plants and replace them with varieties I've held back.....Dwarf Purple Heart, Shazka, and Yellow Pear are now gone, replaced by some of my reserves.
I am also doing some rearranging as some of the central driveway indeterminate varieties grow beyond their stakes and start wanting to topple due to the weight of the fruit - so Rose Quartz is now located next to an edge-growing Cherokee Purple, and they now share an 8 foot stake. I continue to tie and double stake and rotate pots to induce plants to lean against each other! I am always one gusty thunderstorm away from having a real mess....so far so good, knock on wood!
I noticed some small holes in a few developing sweet peppers - tomorrow may be a day to do some very selective, specific spraying with very dilute Sevin to try to knock down the critters at this critical time. It is also time to feed the plants again - they are working hard, setting a ridiculous amount of fruit, and I do believe could use a little boost.
The experimental hot peppers in the small pots are starting to really show themselves - it is becoming clear which are the most attractive and promising - so there will be plenty of decisions and seed saving right around the corner. Same goes for the Islander sweet pepper stabilization project - it is all so interesting. Mostly, I am trying to be really careful about ensuring that the plants get plenty of water. With such tall plants and heavy fruit set, it is impossible to over-water the pots right now!
We've done a series of small tastings the past few days. I am consistently blown away by the flavors of many of the varieties this year. And many of the new and in development dwarf varieties are fully the equal of the heavy hitters like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple! Exciting stuff to be sure, and I will have quite a story to tell them at the Seed Savers Exchange annual campout later this week!
Finally, Alex of the N&O wrote a nice article on our driveway gardening madness in the Sunday paper...which can be found here.
As far as the driveway menagerie of pots, there is always work to be done. Right now, I am watching closely for advancing disease in the tomatoes. Each morning I walk the patch and remove damaged foliage - yet even given that, some plants will soon be on life support. No matter - the objective for me (with so many projects running in the garden) is one ripe fruit for evaluation and seed, and even the worst looking plants have plenty of fruit that should ripen. I am continuing to remove dead plants and replace them with varieties I've held back.....Dwarf Purple Heart, Shazka, and Yellow Pear are now gone, replaced by some of my reserves.
I am also doing some rearranging as some of the central driveway indeterminate varieties grow beyond their stakes and start wanting to topple due to the weight of the fruit - so Rose Quartz is now located next to an edge-growing Cherokee Purple, and they now share an 8 foot stake. I continue to tie and double stake and rotate pots to induce plants to lean against each other! I am always one gusty thunderstorm away from having a real mess....so far so good, knock on wood!
I noticed some small holes in a few developing sweet peppers - tomorrow may be a day to do some very selective, specific spraying with very dilute Sevin to try to knock down the critters at this critical time. It is also time to feed the plants again - they are working hard, setting a ridiculous amount of fruit, and I do believe could use a little boost.
The experimental hot peppers in the small pots are starting to really show themselves - it is becoming clear which are the most attractive and promising - so there will be plenty of decisions and seed saving right around the corner. Same goes for the Islander sweet pepper stabilization project - it is all so interesting. Mostly, I am trying to be really careful about ensuring that the plants get plenty of water. With such tall plants and heavy fruit set, it is impossible to over-water the pots right now!
We've done a series of small tastings the past few days. I am consistently blown away by the flavors of many of the varieties this year. And many of the new and in development dwarf varieties are fully the equal of the heavy hitters like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple! Exciting stuff to be sure, and I will have quite a story to tell them at the Seed Savers Exchange annual campout later this week!
Finally, Alex of the N&O wrote a nice article on our driveway gardening madness in the Sunday paper...which can be found here.
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