State of the Garden July 8

 

Tomato party for lauri's Birthday

July 22nd at the ranch (in North Monterey County California), we will be hosting a tomato event. Your recipes and ingredients, my tomato garden. I believe we should have 10 plus varieties by then. If you are interested, respond with your dish and your blog...

Outsmarted by a gopher current through 7/6

So I bought traps, found a gopher run under ground, put one trap in each direction, covered the hole with a thick slice of straw bale, and really felt guilty about it. This afternoon, 24 hours after setting the trap, I reluctantly lifted the straw slice to find the hole very tightly packed from the inside with fresh dirt. Both traps were tightly encased in dirt but sprung. I set them again farther down the run.
Second try...He did it again. You got to admire the little devil, he springs both traps and really packs the hole I made tightly. Set it again... we'll see.

7/5/2006 Well I got the West gopher. After he had eaten my cucumbers, my green pepper, my spaghetti squash, my basil, my Italian parsley. He apparently was not partial to zucchini (the only plant left in the lower west garden). We have been eating those. I got him with a trap.

Here is what is left, at 6 O clock, you can see the remnant of the spaghetti squash, at 8 O clock, the crater where the bell pepper was, and at 1 O clock, the Zucchini which still survives.

The East gopher is new to me, only met him when he ate my cantaloupe. I hate him too!..I tried hooking my exhaust system to a garden hose and gassing him, but the laws of gas and fluid dynamics were against me. The hose was too long and too narrow, and probably too holey, so no emissions made it to the end. I am going to home depot for a wider diameter. I would rather have this one die underground so I don't have the unpleasant experience of dealing with the corpse. There is a rumor at the hardware store in "town" that there is a local who made a gopher skin vest....
The picture marks the former sit of the cantaloupe with tomato vines hanging through the fence above. The garden tools are meant as a threat.

Black Zebra June 24

This is one of the Love Apple Farm started seedlings. 

Cherokee purple june 24

This is a shy tomato! 

hughs june 24

This is from a seedling that looked like it would surely perish, which was planted in the garden twice. I was so sure it would die that I put it in a hole with another plant I thought sure to die. Both survived and I transplanted this next to the "gate" Amazing!

Palazzo Rospo: Tomatoes

Palazzo Rospo: Tomatoes

http://growingtomatoes2006.blogspot.com/
I have a similar story!

Black Cherry through 7/6

This is the first fruit of Black cherry. There are 3 little guys on this plant. They are hard to see. This plant is from the seedlings started at Love Apple Farm (My second start after the Beagle debaucle)




June 24 There are at least 6 tomatoes today on this vine.













July 6: There are more but these are the ones I first saw on the 21st. So 13 days after appearing, these have not yet ripend. I am too anxious!

First Lady 6/21

This is one of my seedlings! It was one of the better looking when I planted it in the garden, but not what anyone would call "healthy" or "sure to survive". It looks great now!

June 24

Sungold 6/21

Another one of my seedlings!










June 24. They are really getting big fast!

The garden story-current through July 4

In 2005, I happened across an article about a lecture on growing Heirloom tomatoes. Next thing I knew, I had 5 seedlings from Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond. Thinking 5 to be ambitious, I gave away 2, killed one, and planted the two remaining. I dont know what kind they were because I didn't save the flags. One produced round yellow tomatoes which were pretty and tasty. The other produced ruffled purple red green on the outside and green purple on the inside mutant looking tomatoes. many people would not try them. they were FANTASTIC.

SO...in 2006, having bought into a ranch (non-producing) with my manfriend Tony in North Monterey county...I went tomato CRAZY. This time I attended the tomato sowing class at Love apple farm..AND went home with 64 babies and all sorts of new tomato wisdom. This is the story of the fate of those babies.

Here are the babies, day 32 after seading. They live inside, but come out for an occasional visit with their spiritual advisor, the lawn gnome.

Arent they cute? And so healthy. they are comprised of 35 varieties including green giant, love apple, aunt ruby's black zebra, black cherry, kelloggs breakfast, hughs, a possible new variant from love apple to be named sexy beast.





April 22 lament:
I love my tomato babies. I gave them the finest premium Sunland potting soil. I give them food, sunshine, water only when they are thirsty, outdoors time for sun and turgor pressure, indoors time by a window for warmth. But...on day 36, my beagle ate 15 of them...the whole plants, roots and all. Then days 37 through 41, they started to all look bad. They were not in the same tray as the 15 that got eaten, but I think they heard the screams and terror of the lost plants.


Now what? Back to Love Apple Farm where I bought 12 new plants. With the 14 of mine that still were more or less alive, this leaves 29 plants (seedlings technically). So I called in the big guns, my daughter and her boyfriend David to help prepare the ground.

First we rototilled (Well, David did, Lin cheered, and I photographed). Then we added a gigantic tomato cage. Most tomato cages are a two foot in diameter circle of concrete wire fence. Because I didn't want to make 30, and because I wanted protection from the Beagle, I made one cage, hoping to support the plants by tacking them to it as they grow. At this point, I am doubtful that any of "my" seedlings will grow, many are just a couple shrivelled leave sets.

Cynthia Sandberg, tomato goddess and the owner of love apple farm, stresses that it is "all about the soil". She gives a great seedling lecture (2 hours offered several weekends in the spring), where I got on board with the soil quality, but not enough probably. She suggested having the soil tested to know how to ammend it at a soil lab. I took some soil to work, got it wet, found the pH to be 6.5...and decided if the pH was perfect, the rest would be...but I planned my own soil ammendments!

I read that gophers hate rotting things, and Cynthia uses fish emulsion as fertilizer...so we went to a bate shop and bought 30 little fish. I dug each hole 2 feet deep, dropped in the fish and some egg shells (calcium), and filled the hole with Sunland Organic potting soil. There is an aspirin poked in the ground about six inches from each plant. I also planted marigolds between and around where the tomatoes were going in because Marc (the motorcycle rider at Starbucks), said that gophers hate the smell of marigolds.

May 8th...the plants went in.


This is the Garden on May 25.

Note that the Gnome is now swinging. He is upbeat because the tomatoes are miraculously recovering from the edge of demise.











June 12 garden. In constant fear of gophers, I have been putting fish down holes hoping they will be distasteful to a gopher. My gophers, if they exist, are not making the horseshoe shaped mound of dirt around the hole. Maybe I have ground squirrels or moles??? Maybe the fish attract cats who scare away the gophers.

The plants have had one fish emulsion fertilizer treatment 1/2 each week over the past couple of weeks. They also get aspirin spritzes every three weeks.



June 18th. Mulched, fertilized with fish emulsion(odd numbered plants only).


The first fruits were obseved on June 21.

June 23...a dark day (well sunny actually, dark is for drama). I was convinced the gophers were a paranoid dillusion, but one ate my spagetti squash. It was outside the fenced garden, and wasn't planted over a fish...but still! Having no gopher traps (or time, I discovered this on my way out to work), I called the chivalrous Tony, and asked him to go down and throw some fish around.

June 24: I bought gopher traps. Yeah, I feel bad, but as I walk down the center of my garden, their tunnels cave in under my feet! The are everywhere. You can see some documented holes marked by the flags. The straw slab covers the first set of traps. Sad but true. It's them or my babies. The gophers MUST go.

7/4/2006. Got the first gopher. discovered a second...see gopher story.

All plants have at least one fruit. I think Sungold will be first to ripen, but it could be one of the cherries. This weekend I watered on Saturday and Tuesday, and fertilized some of the plants on Tuesday. I spilled the fish emulsion, so that ended the fertilization for the day. I also did the aspirin fritz on Tuesday.

In anticipation of the bouny, I am planning a birthday party for the 23rd where people will be asked to bring their favorite tomatoe recipe and all ingrediants EXCEPT tomatoes...Then we will go down and choose!