Garden

This last week I planted some tomatoes and squash in the vegetable garden boxes. Here are a few tips I used.

Making sure your garden boxes or beds are thoroughly prepared is essential to a good crop. If your soil or mixture is too heavy, most vegetables will not thrive as they would in looser, sandy soil. This isn’t true of all plants, but any that dig their roots deep usually prefer a loose, well draining soil. Last fall when I pulled up everything from the boxes, I added a thick layer of straw, shavings and chicken manure I took directly from the henhouse on top of the boxes and let the girls and nature do most of the work. Personally this is the simplest way to prepare a box, but if you don’t have access to hot manure, simply buy compost and work it in well right before planting.

Once the beds are prepared, it’s time to plant! For tomatoes, a few things that help ensure a fabulous harvest of juicy fruits are plenty of calcium, aspirin and Epsom salt. After digging a good sized hole to cover about two-thirds of the tomato plant (and tearing off all leaves that will be underground) I throw in either a handful of crushed egg shells and a couple aspirin. I like to lightly break up the root ball, but with loose soil it isn’t all that necessary. Fill in with soil and tap lightly around the base of the plant and sprinkle a couple tablespoons of Epsom salt around the plant. This is also when I put wire cages around the plant. I’m trying something new this year, only planting three in a four-foot-by-four-foot garden box with one plant in the northeast corner, one in the northwest corner and one in the south center. We will see if this helps not only with overcrowding but available sun. I also inverted a wire cage between the three and wrapped the ends that normally would go into the ground around one of the rings on each of the cages. Hopefully this will help with stability. If not, it’s just an experiment. For the squash, of which I planted two different kinds of zucchini and some butternut, I used the same technique as the tomatoes as far as placement, but put them all in the center of the box. Squash tends to grow out and over, so I put the mounds only about eight inches apart and will train it go where I want it to go. We’ll see how well this goes.

Rotten Tomatoes

Gardening is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get. Okay, so you know, but you don’t know if it’ll actually come to fruition.

With the abundance of green tomatoes on the vines in our garden boxes, from some we planted from seed, some we purchased, and some that sowed themselves from the previous year, I thought for certain our tomato harvest would be plentiful. Instead, an abundance of rain and cool weather has not only prevented them from ripening, but has caused them to start rotting. I’d say a little over half our crop has rotted out, and that’s quite a bit from an already miniscule amount of fruit these plants have produced (on the ones that actually produced fruit at all.) I guess this is what they refer to as slim pickings.

My original thought on the matter was that we would at least have green tomatoes to fry and dip into some freshly made garlic mayonnaise, but now I don’t know if we’ll even have that. The only two tomatoes that have been giving ripened fruit are the Roma and Sun Gold (orange cherry) plants, the latter being the more proficient. Our Early Girl and Oregon Spring seem to be the most susceptible.

So I decided to do a little more research about rotting tomatoes, and a whole host of things I didn’t consider popped up. I did think blossom end rot could be the culprit on some, but most of these fruits were getting all brown and squishy in various areas and not near the blossom end. As it turns out, even though our summer has been less than ideal, the sun we have been getting has been scalding the tomatoes, probably due to an insufficient amount of leaves to protect them. That, and it also appears that a couple of the plants have early blight which severely decreased the amount of shade available to the fruit. Due to this, there will absolutely not be any tomatoes in that box next year. Methinks lettuce and spinach will have to take their place.

Gardening is a lot of trial and error, and unfortunately this year had a lot of errors, both on our part and the cool, wet summer we had. However, we had absolutely delicious onions, carrots, and strawberries, and our herbs did extremely well too, especially the basils and sage. Our squashes are a different story, as from the thirty or so pumpkin plants we have two pumpkins, and from the four zucchinis we actually pulled four zucchinis… all from the same plant. Oh well, you can’t have a good harvest every year!