Tomato Update 8/30 - Close to the End

At the end of the growing season, I have finally started harvesting tomatoes. It's been getting cold, so I've been picking them as they get their red blush all over, and put them in paper bags. It seems to go quicker, and I'm impatient for tomatoes.




I don't think I'll have enough for sauce and salad, unless the tomato plants hold out a little longer, but whatever, I learned a lot, and I know how to not eff up so much next year. Maybe next year I'll have a backyard, and I can't post about planting in the ground and the completely different learning experience that'll be. Won't that be fun?


A quick photo showing my tomato compared to the store tomato. Theirs is bigger, but fuck if mine doesn't taste a crapload better.

Tomato Update 8/05

The tomatoes are still coming along, no signs of redness yet. I fertilized today, and checked all the fruit for disease, and so far, nothing.

However, I have been noticing that the lower leaves on the oldest plant are starting to die a bit. I'll keep an eye on this, but so far, I think my plants are ok.

Tomato Update - 7/28

This photo is a little late, but better late than never. This is the largest tomato on all four of my tomato plants. After I plucked off all of the diseased fruits and wept, the plant developed a lot of new flowers, that have already started budding into tiny fruits. I have lots of new tomatoes, none of which is suffering from even the early stages of BER. Yay!
I amended the soil with some old compost I had, bone meal, egg shells, and a small amount of unflavored gelatin, which my mother recommended.

I've changed the image hosting to picasa for the blog. I recently installed it on my computer and now I'm wondering whyyy I never looked into it before. However, I think I will keep using Flickr for other photos for the time being. Picasa is just more convenient for posting images here.

Tomato Update - 7/24

It was probably a given that I was going to end up with a disease that is extremely common among container growers. And it doesn't help that I wake up late, well after the sun has started to heat the soil in my pots, and the water dries up.
This is good experience for future tomato growing endeavors, but for now, it's so disheartening, seeing all those tiny tomatoes, with black soft spots on the bottom. UGH. I plucked 8 diseased tomato-ettes a few days ago, but new ones have popped up. There is not ARGH enough to portray my dismay. No, I'm not being melodramatic.
Perhaps I should buy one of those bulb waterers they show on tv? I don't usually drink any bottled drinks, but I managed to scrounge up two old plastic bottles and have them in two of the pots as slow-drip system thingers.




It has suddenly gotten very dark outside, and a bit thundery. Beautiful. Last week lightning struck nearby and reset the power in the entire house. I'm off to unplug important things.

Composting

I have officially given up on composting. I tried, I really did, for more than a year, but the environment of all things, got the best of me.
I live in an area of NY that, between June and September is either humid and hot, or raining and hot. The rest of the year it usually freezes over, so I was constantly struggling with compost that was frozen, or too wet, or infested with fungus gnats. There was never a good time for my compost bins, no matter how much brown I added to cover it up. Sure, it broke down, but what use do I have for it, if it is swarming with gnats. I am a container gardener, and while the compost would probably work in someones veggie garden in their backyard, it simply didn't work when all I had was potted herbs and some flowers.
So, I dug a hole in a corner of the backyard (I rent, and live on the second floor of a house split into 4 apartments) and dumped the compost in there, and covered it up with the dirt I had dug up. The compost that went in smelled and was buggy. Ugh! It was too hard to do it, what with living in an apartment and having very little access to workable browns (ie, grass clippings, dead leaves, hay).
Vermicomposting, while very interesting, isn't an option in this household. My fiance is openly hateful towards worms, and avoids them on sidewalks. Don't ask me why, I have no idea there. It also seemed quite difficult, to me. I was unsure where exactly I was going to be able to sort the compost without terrifying the man, and what if I missed the tiny eggs while I was sorting? Is it ok to have worms in my tiny containers? Nothing I read on the subject really shed any light on that, and I figure they're writing more towards people who have room to garden.
On that note, the worms in the bins do reproduce and grow in numbers, and what was I going to do with the excess? Give it to bait shops? Save it for the day the man pisses me off enough that I resort to covering his side of the bed with worms? I figure that would be more than I really wanted from compost.
I hope I didn't scare anyone away from composting because it really is a great way to reduce the amount of garbage that leaves your household, but in my case, it just didn't work.

No photos this time around.

Spring 09

           

The tomato I first planted in late January has been coming along, albeit not without some struggle. It's been transplanted into a bigger container and already has quite a few leaves, as you can see in the first photo. However, I might have been a little heavy handed with the fertilizer I added and might have burned the early leaves a little bit (photo 3).

The violet blooms are my biggest surprise of the season. When we bought the plant about a year ago it bloomed for a few weeks, then went dormat for a while, with nice dark green leaves. When it started blooming a few weeks ago, I was super surprised. It's been a very low maintenance plant, thus far.


Next Update: Chamomile Seedling & My Compost

Fighting the Winter Blues

This is an experiment in winter gardening. I'm so exasperated by all the cold around here that I just had to do it, to hell with conventional seed starting dates. In my defense, though, it's highly probable that none of these plants will ever live full time outside. Except for maybe the tomatoes. (Yes, I planted tomatoes mid-January, sue me, it's boring here.)

There's basil, oregano, chamomile, tomatoes, and catnip. In retrospect I probably should have labeled the containers, but for a few of them its too late, and their seeds were too microscopic too identify now. The tomatoes are in the toilet paper roll though.

Everything, as you can see, is edible. Except for the catnip, which is going to be harvested and dried and stuffed into hand-made cat toys. If I could have a cat I would do it in a second, but Richard's allergic. The joke's on him, though, I'm allergic to dogs.

If this winter garden fails, I lost out on a few seeds, but I'll just toss the stuff into my compost pile. Otherwise, I'm going to eat like a queen, and the next door neighbor's cats are going to be the happiest fatties around.