Hi! Errr, long time no post. I keep meaning to do more updates, but it usually breaks down that I either have time to blog about gardening, or actually DO gardening. And we all know which one wins that competition.
So, a quick update since we last talked. May was cold. We had a frost warning on Memorial Day, for goodness sake. I lost most of the first batch of tomato seedlings I started. I don’t know what it was, maybe bad starting soil. So I re-started around the end of April. It turned out to be a good thing, since with such a cold May I had to wait until May 31st to plant. I did lose a few more seedlings, but since I started with about twice as many as I needed there wasn’t a problem. I did give 7 seedlings to my Mom, 6 to my cousin, 5 to the nice lady who provides us with perennial plants for free, and 5 to some lady Vicki knits with. No shortages here.
I planted 42 tomato plant in the garden, 2 in pots, and one under the bird feeder. They’ve been in for almost 3 weeks now and are mostly 2-3 feet tall and getting bushy. I have flowers all over the place, and a few tiny green tomatoes on my Stupice. I also went with my plan of making huge tomato cages. They’re a bit cost restrictive so I only made 20, but I think they’ll stop the Tomato Jungle like I had last year. Here’s a few pics:
You can see the cages. They took some doing, since I had to cut them out of a big roll of fence and bend little hooks so I could attach the two ends together. I also cut small windows so I could reach in and weed, pet my plants, and hopefully have somewhere to pull the ripe fruit out of. The garlic in the foreground is doing okay, but not great. Since the sun doesn’t hit that area until the end of April due to the shadown of neighbor’s house they got a late start. The main garlic garden is doing much better (pic below). Also the potatoes are growing like crazy! (upper left) They’ve just started to flower, which means they have about a month to go before they die back. But I can start stealing a few potatoes pretty soon.
Oh, and what’s that behind the tomato cages on the right? Yup, more mutant huge sunflowers, already taller than the tomatoes. The cages should keep those pushed back so I don’t have to worry about them crushing my toms this year.
Here’s another view of that garden:
Yes, that’s tomatoes all the way down to the end, with another patch past the potato patch. And there’s 4 sweet pepper plants down by the rain gutter between tomato patches. I also have 2 of my cages down on the end to act as pole bean supports. I started two kinds of beans this year, my Granny’s green beans and a white runner bean I got from Victory Seeds. Here’s a close-up of the beans:
They’re just starting to send out runners to climb. I love the pole beans since they take up little space and you get tons of beans. And they actually add nitrogen to the soil, so they’re good for the garden.
Here’s a picture of the OTHER garden:
That’s the main garlic haul. They’ve started sending up scapes, which are the seed pods that curl up from the plant. I cut them off and eat them, since I don’t want the plant expending energy to flower when they could send that sugar back down into the bulbs. Besides, they’re delicious in a stir-fry. 
That also means that the garlic has a month or so to go before harvest.
In the middle of the picture are the brussel sprout plants that Vicki requested. I think I might have started them a bit early, since you don’t harvest anything until after the first frost (mid to late October here). I wonder how big they’ll get with all that time to grown. Yikes. Towards the back are little plots of lettuce, spinach, onions, and peas. It got really shady back there when the lilac bush got going (upper right) so I don’t know how much I’ll get. I’ve already harvested some green onions, spinach, and lettuce, so it’s not a complete waste of time. I have to harvest the rest of the spinach and lettuce before it gets too hot and they bolt (send up seed pods) and get bitter.
I also planted some melons and squash on the extreme left side of the picture. The idea was that they’d get going right about the time the garlic would be dug out, so they’d have all that area to vine across towards the sun. I have a few little seedlings, but they haven’t been growing much. It might just be too cool here. Those big viners like really hot weather and it’s still cool here when the wind is over Lake Michigan to the east.
What else, you ask? Well, I have some more of the Japanese Climbing Cucumbers which we grew last year. They’re in a pot with another of my towers around it. 
Still pretty small. They like the hot weather, too. The pot helps with that a bit, since it gets hotter than the ground soil. Gotta watch out that it doesn’t get too dry, though.
Speaking of pot, I mentioned about that I put the last few tomato plants in some pots since I’d run out of garden space. Here’s Abraham Lincoln, next to a pot of catnip.
Lastly, here it is! Drumroll, please!
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My First Tomato of 2008!
Mike
June 19th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Whoo! Hi tomato! I have FOUR now (one plant) and it is so exciting!
June 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I have 4 tomato plants in pots. You are my muse.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am
WOW. Those are serious cages. Do you prune out the suckers? I assume most of your heritage toms are indeterminate?
June 26th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Kim,
Yeah, they’re 6-ft high cages. I had originally planned to cut out the bottom foot of horizontal wires and leave only the vertical wires in spikes to stick into the ground. That turned out to be a LOT of work, so I just wove my stakes into the wires and pounded them into the ground.
All my toms are indeterminate, but I don’t like pruning suckers. Again, it’s a lot of work (I like my gardening lazy) and it reduces the number of tomatoes produced per plant. This led to my horrible tomato jungle of last year. I grew a lot of tomatoes, but it wasn’t healthy for the plants and a lot of them got foliage diseases from not having proper ventilation. I also got quite a bit of blossom end rot.
The nice thing about the cages is that I don’t have to prune much. I can just adjust the main vines so they stay in the cage. I prune a bit at ground level so the leaves don’t get dirty (which can cause disease) and if any branch gets too far away from the cage. But for the most part I can just let it grow straight up. I don’t know if they’ll reach the top of the cage. I’ve heard vines growing up to the top of a 5-ft cage and then all the way down to the ground again. That’s what I’m hoping for.
The last batch of fence I just bought was only 5-ft high, but the tomato plants at the far end of the garden are smaller, so that should work out.
Mike
July 4th, 2008 at 6:29 am
In our old community garden, we built a huge trellis (7 ft high) with similar fencing for the tomatoes. It worked beautifully, except when a local family decided to help themselves to all the tomatoes (not as weird as when all the raw lima beans went missing). I grow tomatoes on a much smaller scale than you, but I lurve the Lee Valley tomato spirals (also quite cost restrictive, unfortunately). They make the sucker pruning really quick and easy. I haven’t had any foliage diseases (knock on wood), but my watering issues (What? Xeriscaping doesn’t work with tomatoes?) did lead to blossom end rot. My task for this weekend is to set up my gravity-feed rain barrel watering system. Haven’t really needed it yet!
Do you mulch? I do, religiously, in the perennial garden, but I haven’t in the veggie garden, mostly because the mulch I currently have is pine chips, which I don’t think would be great. People keep saying straw. I’m sure I could find some, but it’s pretty fugly. Also, it seems like it would be unwieldy around the smaller plants. Maybe some less rotted leaf compost. (More work…)
I also love all my perennial veggies (and herbs and fruit). So much less work! Sorrel, jerusalem artichoke, asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries, sage, mint (in pots). Nom! I’ve also been espaliering fruit trees. Might actually get some peaches this year. Too many things like eating my apples though.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Kim,
Yeah there was a great post on gardenweb about people just helping themselves to gardener’s produce and then being confused when someone called them on it (”You mean this isn’t free????). Or people who were given free tomatoes the year before actually calling to ask when “their” tomatoes were going to be ready this year.
Last year I mulched to try to keep the tomato sprawl from getting into the dirt too much. I had a lot of dirt bacterial disease by the end of the season. This year I’m pruning any leaves of branches that are too close to the ground to try to prevent that. I also mulched the tomatoes I don’t have cages for with straw (see pics in next post). Also to keep down the weeds. I didn’t mulch the tomatoes in the cages because there was no easy way of doing it and they keep the weeds down pretty well with their shade.
Ooooh, perennials. We have a few (and I mean one or two) sprigs of asparagus that comes up between the bushes and the garage. There’s also some rhubarb there, but it’s a bad spot with lots of shade so neither of them will get very big. I have a small strawberry patch between the garden and the house from which I get a few handfuls of strawberries every year. And George the cherry tree is still shorter than I am and makes a few dozen sour cherries in June, which the birds eat.
Mike