End of May veggie update

Lots and lots to show you today! First, here's some of my bigger squash. The plants are loaded with them, all different sizes from one inch long to almost ready to pick. The two I DID pick are at the bottom of this post:


And a snowpea (with the squash wading pool in the background) these are so good I'm not even getting many pictures of them, not cooking them or steaming them, just eating them raw and crunchy:


My cherry tomato bush is loaded with little tomatoes. I've picked two of the ripest ones already, you'll see them at the bottom of the post.


So is my grape tomato bush, and they've got differing shades of green and orange going on, too. I like it when they start producing one to three tomatoes per day, that's exactly what I need for my salad.


After I picked the one LONG pepper from each pepper plant, now both of them are producing 'normal' sized peppers:


Here's what's ripened and been picked today. Two little squash, both about 5 inches long. Two cherry tomatoes, four grape tomatoes, and one Better Boy tomato. Plus two snowpeas that made the picture, but got eaten before I could get the jpg cropped and up here on the blog. :D

Mid-May Garden Update

Ready for more tomato and squash pictures? Sorry, there's no snowpea pix, I've *guilty grin* eaten them all.

Here's my Cherry Tomato bush. Some of them are getting too big to really call them cherry tomatoes, but they're not ripening yet, still just as green as they can be. I hope they don't all ripen the same day! Between this bush, and the Grape Tomato bush you've seen already, I should be swimming in little tomatoes pretty soon.


I have two pots with banana pepper plants, and one pot has ONE immensely long pepper, and a handful of smaller buds. But this one looks too long to be normal, somehow. Maybe it's a mutant alien pepper... :)


My Early Girl bush has several golf-to-plum sized tomatoes, but again, all still very green.


I'm most proud of my squash plants though - lots and lots of blooms and lots and lots of teeny squash. Here's two of the biggest so far. Maybe thumb sized? Too small to eat, but a good size to drool over. After last year with no squash but lots of blooms, I was about to say that squash growing in a kiddy wading pool didn't work, but this year is a total reversal.

It's snowpeas and squash!

I was so surprised to go out and look at my garden and discover that I don't just have foliage, I have veggies! First, here's my snowpeas - I picked the one in the middle and I'm going to eat it right now:

*crunching noises*

Yup, mighty good! The other two I plan on leaving until tomorrow night's salad, let them get just a bit longer.


And squash! Cute little ones, but still, more than I got last summer:


These are doubly precious to me since there's so many of them - I guess it's the difference between regular dirt and planting in Miracle Gro potting soil.


Here's the biggest. Still smaller than my little finger, but bigger than the others:


The grape tomato bush is full of blooms and little tomatoes too - want to play dot-to-dot with teeny tomatoes? Click on the picture to enlarge, lol


And there's peppers on both plants now. I'll put this last so you can easily compare it to the picture taken a week ago ... look how my pepper is growing!

Squash, Peppers and Windchimes

Ohhh, lookie what I saw when I looked under the leaves of my squash plant today! Surely with all those buds, I'll get at least ONE squash worth eating, don't you think?


And a little pepper - I can't wait for these to start growing. Does anyone know if the dark streaks up the stem there 'mean' something? Like over or under watering or... ?


And finally, got a shepherd's crook at Home Depot today. A friend of mine from Georgia gave me this last winter, and I've been wanting to put it out ever since! What's neat, it's also a birdfeeder, you fill the globe with seeds. I think I'll wait till late fall for that, because I don't want to attract birds to the area where my ripe tomatoes will be. :D

Little Green Tomatoes

Everything is coming up little green tomatoes! Here's five of the seven that're on my cherry tomato bush. I may not even have to stake this one, it's staying low and compact:


This is the Early Girl plant, they're looking nice too:


Only a couple on the big boy plant so far. Here's the biggest:


The grape tomato bush is my top producer. Twelve tomatoes that I can count, (although some of them are teeny-tiny) and bunches and bunches of blooms:


And here's my biggest tomato, slightly larger than a golf ball size, on the Better Boy plant. It has another couple of marble sized ones.


Meanwhile, my squash hasn't got any blooms yet, just buds, but the foliage is sure getting big and healthy looking:


I've taken the wire off the peony bush, and moved it to the back again. I also shifted the snowpeas to the end so I could sink the legs of the wire frame into the dirt, then I started using some scraps of fabric and selvedges to tie up the vines.



The peppers have blooms too, both plants - but they're growing very slowly, compared to the tomatoes.

How does YOUR garden grow?

End of April veggie update

I'll start with the obligatory group shot:


My grape tomato plant has lots of clusters of blooms, but no little green tomatoes yet:


But my Early Girl plant has a tomato! This first one is about marble sized:


The peonies in the previous post are using the wire cage that I'll put between the snowpeas. They're getting tall enough to where they need it! Maybe I ought to go buy another one. I had to scoot the window boxes apart so the peas wouldn't grab onto each other. ;)


The squash in the wading pool is doing fine too, much healthier looking than last year.


And last, my Better Boy tomato. I'm wondering now if this one or the Early Girl will ripen first. The race is on!

Yet another Cat and Garden Update

First, a request from Mom. She liked the picture of Libby from my last post, but demands that Toby get equal time. So here's my other rescued Siamese. He wanted to look out the window undisturbed and chatter at the birds, especially a dove that lives in the ash tree. But I wanted a picture and kept tapping him on his furry little butt, so he'd look at ME instead of the bird. He finally turned around, looked exasperated, and gave me a couple of long meows. So this is him explaining, "The white bird is out there, I'd much rather watch it, if you'd quit thumping my rear end, I could concentrate. Understood?"


So I'll leave the cat alone, and start with the garden headline news ... my first tomato! It's on the Better Boy plant, the one that had blooms when I bought it. This plant has three, but the other two are even smaller-than-green-pea size.


The wading pool squash are going great so far. I'm not going to let myself get too excited, though, because they were going pretty good last year too, till the rabbit got them. Any of you that regularly garden know of a good companion plant that I could grow with the squash? I've heard corn, but... not in a wading pool, of course.


And here's my windowbox snowpeas. I'll have to put them near the cage pretty soon, so they can climb, but the cage is round front by my peony bush. When they start getting the huge golf-ball size buds, the peonies are usually too heavy for the stem and need some support until the blooming is over.


And, I'll close with another group shot. ;) The banana pepper plants aren't growing near as fast as the tomatoes, anyone know why? Any advice?

Garden Update for Mid April

*grins*
Get used to it, I like to keep a photo-record of my plants. ;)

Here's another version of the group shot I took 9 days earlier - scroll down to see the previous group shot - I like seeing how they've grown, and it's fun to be able to look back on last year and see which ones grew best, and produced earliest. Several of the tomato plants now have buds and blooms, the Better Boy has three teeeeeny little tomatoes, not even the size of an English pea yet.


My squash in the kiddy pool is doing great - I planted 5 seeds per hill, as the directions on the back of the packet showed, but not all of them are up. I wonder if storing these seeds in the freezer (they're the ones that didn't get used last year) impacted their hmm... sprout-ability? Viability, that's the word I was looking for. Most, but not all of the snow peas sprouted, and they were stored in the freezer too.


And finally, a picture of Libby, who hates to go outside, but loves to sit in the window and watch me when I'm outside.

Garden Beginnings for April

Ready to meet my new plant family? This is Easter weekend, so that means planting time at my house. I spent three hours this morning, shifting dirt from container to container, repotting, and planting.

The squash in a kiddie wading pool first - last year this didn't work. Not even ONE squash. But I kept the extra seeds in the freezer and I'm trying again. This time, better dirt instead of the topsoil I used before. I also poked some bigger holes in the bottom for drainage. I have five hills of five seeds planted. Last year, I thought I was being smart and tried to stagger the planting times, thinking I'd have squash early, squash late, and even end-of-summer squash. Instead, I think I might have not had enough blooming at one time to fertilize each other. I also had rabbit problems - this year, once they sprout, I'm doing the stinky kitty litter trick around the outside of the pool earlier -- after I did that last summer, I didn't see hide nor 'hare' of the rabbit for the rest of the season. :)


I enjoyed the produce from my sweet banana pepper plant so much last summer, I decided I'd have two this year. I'm planting them in better soil this year too, so I hope I don't get massively over peppered! Meet Banana One and Twin.



And about the CD's -- I'm always tempted to lie and say they're providing some esoteric nutrient to the soil, or they're providing reflected sunlight to the understory of the plants ... nope, they're just there for bird scare. When my tomatoes get 'caged' I use scissors to cut a slice thru the CD and put them on the cages, where the slightest breeze spins them back and forth and sets them flashing.

I haven't yet had a surplus of tomatoes in my little garden, so this year I bought still another container, plus more dirt, and I'm putting out a bunch. First, a Better Boy. Lookie, three little yellow tomato blooms! I had one of these last year, and it did really well:


Then I'm trying grape tomatoes for the first time. I often buy these at the supermarket, and spend $2.50 or so for a little plastic box of them. I'll try to keep some account of how many the plant produces, and see if I save anything.


Next, a Big Boy. I'm hoping this will produce some larger tomatoes I can slice and use on sandwiches. I used one of my big new plastic terracotta containers for this - it's a normal sized tomato plant, not one of the little container 'bushes,' so I'm slightly worried that it may be too much for a container. We'll see.


Here's another I've had in the past, a Husky Cherry Red. This was one of the varities that got me started in container gardening - it was so much fun going out every evening and picking a couple of cherry tomatoes for my salad. Juicy, round, and sweet, they were great. And they weren't prone to splitting either.


I have had this one too, and couldn't resist another. I'm not sure if this Early Girl will have the first ones ripe this summer since the Better Boy already has blooms, I'll have to wait and see.


Now, a group shot of my container garden - and if you look off to the left corner you can see my two window boxes with snowpeas. I planted the seeds for that last week. When I was planting everything else this morning, I was delighted to see that I now have tiny little green leaves poking out of the dirt. I didn't have any mulch on them though, so I re-covered the little shoots with some loose mulch when I was adding mulch to the tops of the tomato containers.

Garden Update for Beginning of June

I'm baaaack. ;) and wow, am I glad to have internet at home again. On the right in the picture below, my new modem. Now to catch you up with my garden! This is my first little crop. One tomato (between ping pong ball and tennis ball size) and eleven snow peas, on top of that snack sized baggie there. I'm really trying to save them till I have enough to stir fry, but it's hard! I like them raw too.


Here's the tomatoes still on the vine, another Early Girl just starting to get orange. The Better Boy tomatoes are in the foreground, but I think they have some growing to do still.


And here's the status of the crookneck squash. The kitty litter trick has worked, and no more gobbled blooms.


Last, my snow peas. I almost wish I'd planted more of these, instead of just 20 plants, they're really delectable. I've eaten only four of them, so far. But the package directions say they don't do too well in the heat of the summer. Instead, I'll wait till August and put in a new crop for fall.



Anyone out there know when the squash blooms open? I'm worried that with fewer bees, I'm going to have more of a crop if I go pollinate with a q-tip. But every time I've been out there, the blooms are twisted shut. Healthy looking, but closed.