First Tomato and August Update

 I picked the first slicing Tomato today.  It is my PaPaw's Tomato.  Not a surprise.  It is often the first to ripen.  All of the Tomato plants are covered in fruit so soon I will be giving them away.  But tomorrow, this will be my lunch!

Right now it is all about Corn and Beans!  We are finishing up the early Solstice Corn which has been awesome, and by next weekend we will be starting on the larger Gotta Have It variety.

Gotta Have It

Seychelles

I am having to make water choices now.  I am half way through my water tank and just a 50/50 chance of a thunderstorm mid-week.  The late Corn and the Beans get as much water as they need, and after that it gets rationed to the containers with Sweet Potatoes, Peppers and Eggplants.  The Tomatoes are fine without and the Cucumbers are wrapping up.

I fully expected to pull the Pickling Cucumber vines first.

But today the Gateway slicer vines went over the hill so those came out.  They were showing the first hint of wilt, and since they had no babies coming along, rather than let the wilt get worse I just pulled them out.

Zucchini with Dahlias in the background

Dahlias and English Cucumbers

I have Chelsea Prize English Cucumbers blooming now.  They are obviously not bred for disease resistance because they are a greenhouse Cucumber and usually greenhouses are much more protected environment.

Chelsea Prize English Cucumbers

Last year I did not water the Compost Volunteer Cantaloupes even once, so I am taking the same route this year.  The Pumpkins don't get water because they are just for fun, but the Pumpkins are gaining size anyway.

Cantaloupe and Pumpkins

Last year I religiously watered the Belstar Broccoli and got an exceptional second crop.  But then I did not have Sweet Corn hogging the water.  This year I am watering sparingly and they are still putting out new branches.  You can see the fresh, bluish foliage below.

The Tomatoes and Bell Peppers are disease free and producing.  I would say that the plants are not as thick as they were last year and that is probably due to them stalling out in early June from the weather.  But I also have one less Tomato plant in the row than I did last year.  So far I think that the fruit production is going to be comparable.

Wall-O Tomat-O

The Sweet Potatoes and Carrots in containers are growing well.  The Carrot greens are beginning to get weary.  I haven't pulled a Carrot recently but I am sure they have reached the bottoms of the containers by now.  I also have a row of YaYa Carrots fending for themselves behind the Strawberry cages.  I pulled one yesterday for a snack and they are doing well.  I will leave those in the ground past frost to use for autumn cooking.

Sweet Potatoes and Carrots

Beans!  We have lots of Beans.  I have picked many meals from them a handful at a time and then made my Dilly Beans and tomorrow I will start picking to freeze.  We go through two gallons of frozen beans a year.  I water them well at least every other day.  They have Marigolds at their feet to keep the roots cool and shaded and I haven't had much trouble with them wilting in the hot afternoons.  We are pushing 90F now and they are very happy.  You have to be more careful when maintaining Bush Beans because if they wilt they stub the Beans against the ground and you get a lot of curly Beans.  Pole Beans are comparatively easy.  These look even better than last year.  Last year the yellow Monte Gusto variety had quite pale vines and I never got them to green up and look nice.  These are very happy.

Monte Gusto on the left and Seychelles to the right

The Dwarf Tomatoes and Onions are doing fine. but the Kookaburra Cackle and Summertime Gold varieties are showing quite a bit of disease.  It is not really passing to the Adelaide Festival plant at the head of the row.  Last year that one was very disease resistant.  

The Kookaburra Cackle Tomato will be the first Dwarf to ripen.  It is a brown Tomato descending from Cherokee Purple. We'll see if it is a keeper or not. 

I am down to just a handful of container plants.  A backup Zucchini plant, some Strawberry babies and ornamental purple Peppers.  

Once again I am fighting a losing battle against flea beetles on the Eggplant, but Little Prince does not seem to mind and is producing "an abundance" of fruit just as advertised.

Just look at all of those lousy beetles

The landscape is looking nice and not presenting any problems.  

I just have to keep my eyes open for the occasional weed! 

Turn your back just for a minute!

Viney Things

 Below is an excellent example of the Cucumber support trellis letting the fruit hang down so they are perfectly straight and easy to find.  Those three are all on the same vine.  I always buy my Cucumber seed from Johnny's Seeds because they seem to have the best disease resistant hybrid varieties.  These are Gateway.

Two years ago I saved seeds from a Pumpkin I bought at the store in October.  I didn't get around to planting them last year, but this year I found a spot.  The largest has gone past basketball size and is starting to turn orange.

The next two are approaching basketball size.  Oddly enough, because the Ppumpkin I bought was undoubtedly a hybrid, some of the Pumpkins are coming out yellow.  There have been more yellows at the base of the blooms, but this one is the only one that has set and stayed.

My second generation "Compost Queen Cantaloupes" have produced a dozen fruit.  

They are looking more smooth than segmented.  We'll see....

The first blush of color on the slicing tomatoes.  It may be hard to see, but I am looking closely every day and I see it.

Today was a colorful harvest.  Cherry Tomatoes, an Eggplant and some orange Bell Peppers.

The Candy Onions are beginning to fall over showing that they are done growing and ready to cure.  I put them in the shade every day until the green leaves dry and turn brown.

Dahlia of the Day:  Happy Single Date 

One petal has dropped off, but the Bumble Bees still love it.

A New Butterfly

 When we were sitting out today, I noticed a brand new to me Butterfly.  I quickly Google Lensed it and found it is the White Admiral.

Apparently it is a subspecies of the Red Spotted Purple which we have a lot of.  The white banding covers up most of the red spots but the blue is still visible.

The Great Lakes region is the intersection between the ranges of the two subspecies and apparently they can hybridize and create unique color variations.

  That would be fun to see.

First Sweet Corn

 The maturity date on my Solstice Sweet Corn was July 30th but I gave it an extra three days.  It was so good!  It was sweet and tender and perfectly pollinated.  Last year I didn't grow corn and I only bought corn on the cob from the local farmstand once.  It was so disappointing that I didn't buy any more corn last year.  So this has been a long awaited delicacy.

Summer Squash and Strawberries

 My Zucchini plants have hit their stride and I have to stay sharp and pick them small so I don't get flooded with squash.  My favorite way to eat these is to grill or fry them with onions and serve them on buttered pasta with garlic salt.  But last week I did make Blueberry Zucchini Muffins because I had wonderful, fresh picked Blueberries.  

Clarimore and Dunja Summer Squash

I always plant two seeds together when I plant Zucchini.  One plant grows left and the other grows right making an attractive mound of leaves instead of ending as scraggly, one sided plants.  Sometimes I over indulge with too many Zucchini plants, but usually I just plant one mound, and maybe keep a backup in a gallon pot in case of squash bugs.

This year I mixed my varieties so one mound is producing two different squash.  It makes for a nice, colorful harvest.  My favorite varieties (mostly for their disease resistance) are Clarimore and Dunja.

Note the old kitchen knife stock in the seam of the raised bed size.  It is always there available for cutting off a Zucchini without tearing the stem.

My Seascape Strawberries planted as bareroot plants this spring have finally begun to grow and produce a good crop.  The rest of my plants are Honeoye Junebearing which I have planted several times.  But I keep seeing good reviews of the Seascape Day Neutral berries which continue to produce berries all season.  I made freezer jam from the June harvest, but it is nice to have berries all summer.  And not just one or two like other varieties, but a good handful.  This is the second handful I have picked and the first one was more impressive.  I just didn't have a camera with me.   These could have gone another day or two to sweeten up more, but we had a rainy day forecast and rainy day Strawberries are blah.  I love Strawberries on my salads, and it is nice to have a bowl sitting on the counter for snacking throughout the day.

We are currently enjoying a much needed all day rain.  The temperature is 59F (15C) and the house is opened up.  My plans for my non-gardening day are to bake a cheesecake with Blueberry topping and to put up a batch of Dill pickles.

Long Term Fixes

Sometimes you will have something to fix in the garden that takes a long... long... time.  Back in March, when the snow melted, I noticed that we had a Vole that had nested in one of the evergreen grasses that are up against our deck.  And also that the three Prima Ginger Echinacea plants had suffered quite a bit of Vole damage.  Bed and breakfast. The one in the bottom right corner of the photo below was completely adrift having had all of its roots eaten off below the surface.  The other two also had the delicate roots completely eaten, but each was still anchored by one root the thickness of a pencil.  I heeled the other two in well, but the one that was completely detached I took into the garden, potted in a gallon pot, and left it there in the garden where I could keep an eye on it.

When gardening activity began in May, I would keep it watered and about once a week I would lift up on it to see if was growing any roots.  It was putting out green leaves, and little white hair roots, but they were not anchoring it to the soil.  It needed water at least twice a day and would sometimes look awfully wilted and miserable.  Still I did not give up and around Mid-June it finally gave resistance to being moved and at that point it took off and even flowered.  The other two that I left in the bed were fine with their single roots and grew as normal.  So how do I prevent this next winter?  For one thing I am cutting back those Carex grasses.  Also, I will put wire cloches on the Echinacea and pin them down hard.  In the past, the wire cloches have proven to turn the voles away from Primrose and such.

There is a product created to protect fine roots in Vole situations.  They are essentially chain mail jackets and can be purchased on Amazon.  After the damaged one had rooted in pretty well, I transplanted it into one of these bags.  You just put the bag in a gallon pot and fill with soil.  I gave it some more weeks to recover from that, but it was no longer happy in a pot, difficult to keep watered in this hot weather.  Now it is planted back in the landscape and has perked back up.  When we clear the beds in the fall, I will unroll to top of the bag and hopefully, the combination of cloche and bag will protect it.  I have hesitated to dig up the other two and bag them because they have been growing so well.  Maybe later.

By the way... those red (actually deep tangerine) I started from seed this spring.

I'm still working my way around all of the Daylilies, cutting them back.  The first ones to be cut back have already pushed new growth, and some of them are even putting out new flower stems.

There are a few Daylilies that I simply removed.  I don't like their color or form well enough to try to protect them, but I still don't want the deer eating them.  I'm replacing them with something I like that the deer don't like so much.  Choose your battles.  So now I have a few open holes prepped for next year.  The Daylilies had already outgrown their holes anyway.

As I am clearing the planting spots, I am correcting another mistake I made.  Some of the holes are just too close to rocks.  The below hole, for example, was very difficult to get past the rocks and down to ground level to cut off the foliage with a trimmer.  I cut out a larger space in the road fabric and I am replacing the Lily, which had to be cut to the ground once or twice a year, with something that doesn't require such drastic pruning.  Probably a Butterfly Bush.

While we are out here, take a look at these volunteer Petunias.  This is one of the planters that took the place of the Whiskey Barrels.  I planted Yellow River Hosta in them, and I think that when those plants are mature, their large, three foot span, will look quite impressive in these planters.  In the mean time, though the Hosta are doing well and putting on new growth, they don't look very pretty.  Four or five years ago I had planted Sugar Daddy Petunias and each year I get some volunteers seeding themselves.  Even though I completely dumped the soil out of these planters, turned it over, and put it back, the Petunia seeds were just waiting for another chance to do their thing,

The Hosta makes a nice center piece, but until it fills the pot, we can have other things in there too.

White Marigold Reviews

 One of my annual basics is Marigolds.  They are inexpensive, easy to grow, and adaptable.  Pollinators like them.  Rabbits and Deer don't care too much for them.  Their only natural enemy that I can see is slugs.  But that is easily solved by slug bait, and it is sometimes useful to know where the slugs are as long as you have a spare Marigold or two to replace the ones they skeletonize.  I don't mind replacing a few Marigolds if it means I can bait and defeat the slugs before the Dahlias emerge.

I have always scattered them around the vegetable garden for color but a few years ago I started using them to construct decorative hedges here and there.  For these I preferred the Vanilla F1 variety.  They were the right height with a tight and tidy form.  And they really were nearly white.  They are quite a bright spot in the landscape, and easily seen from any distance.

Vanilla

The past couple of years, Harris Seeds has not produced and marketed them and, unfortunately, there is nothing quite as good on the market.  First I tried saving seeds from the last of the plants from the seeds I had left, but because they are an F1 Hybrid the results were varied and none of them close to what I wanted.  I've tried Snowball (not bad but fewer flowers) and White Swan (too tall).  This year I tried three more varieties, and they are beginning to show their true colors.

Vanilla Cream

The best one is Vanilla Cream.  It is compact and full of blooms.  But as you can see it is not as white.  The photo above and the one below were taken within minutes with the same camera settings, but nearly imperceptible changes in light enhance the yellowness so that one minute you are happy with the shade and the next you realize they may be yellow afterall.  From a distance they still read as white.  More of a French Vanilla Ice Cream white.

Moonlight (below) is quite plainly yellow and did not have very good germination, survival or growth rates.  They are not bushing out even as well as a standard yellow variety.

Moonlight

Creamy White was showing promise.  It is a vigorous plant, a little late to bloom, and very fluffy and rangy.  That wouldn't be a big deal except when the blooms finally began to open up...

Creamy White

...they were sort of a cross between anemone style blooms and single flowers and not even remotely like pompons.  But they are quite white.   The plants were way too tall for what I wanted along the shorter Dahlias even though I had already pinched back the main leader about eight inches weeks ago.  Once I saw what the blooms would be like I went ahead and pruned them back hard for size control.

I am now waiting for the Creamy Whites to get over sulking and put forth even a single bloom.  Obviously they are not a strong performer, because even the four plants along the side of the bed that I only pinched and did not prune hard have failed to bloom at this late date,  The Vanilla Cream are good enough that I went and purchased enough seeds for next year when they went on sale.  I may also go back and experiment again with Snowball but next year is the Semiquincentennial and I am planning a Red White and Blue theme in my annuals and I will need some reliable white Marigolds for that.