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!

Busy Bees and Baby Veggies

 The little eggplants are starting to look promising.

The first ripe tomato was a Micro Tina.  It tasted just as good but was only the size of a gumdrop

The slicing tomatoes are starting to size up.  It will still be weeks before they begin to ripen.

The Queen Anne's Lace and the Dill are extraordinarily popular with all of the pollinators.  I would guess there are hundreds in there from Wasps to Sweat Bees.  The Honey Bees are on the white clover in the lawn and the Thyme under the Apple tree.  But they are also stopping by the Cucumber flowers.  And I found a Bumble Bee pollinating the Zucchini this morning.  Everyone has a job to do.

I almost forgot

Daylily of the Day:  Stella Supreme

Soon....

 

First Tomato Sandwich

 

I picked this Carbon tomato a few days ago and left it ripen on the counter.  That's not something that I usually do, but when it has been 10 months since your last tomato sandwich you don't want to mess around and tempt fate.

The Ritual of the First Tomato - Harvest Monday

 The single most popular crop grown in American gardens is the tomato.  Roughly 86% or 9 out of 10 gardeners plant tomato plants.  I know a lot of people grow them to make tomato sauce, but I would say the most iconic use of tomatoes by the home gardener is the Tomato Sandwich.  Not even a BLT.  Although I like bacon, and am not above making myself a bacon sandwich, bacon just gets in the way of the season's first Tomato Sandwich.  So we all wait impatiently for that first slicer to ripen in the garden.

It may not be the biggest.

It may not be the prettiest.

But it will be the best tomato of the whole year.

I always start watching the first fruit set of the season.  This year it was the Carbon.  This tomato is new to me this year.  It is a black, indeterminate slicer which is renowned for its taste.  I knew which cluster of tomatoes was likely to ripen first and every day I would check them to make sure they were doing OK.  When the time approached, I began to check several times a day!

I picked this tomato yesterday.  I feel that picking a tomato in the height of a warm afternoon intensifies the taste.  My first slicing tomato from the garden has been as early as July 21st.  Waiting until August 8th was a trial on my patience.  However, when I did the math, it was 77 days from the day I potted up the transplants.  Carbon is a 76 day tomato.  Right on schedule!

It is also one of my earliest slicing varieties this year.  In the next 10 days I should see my Sparks color up and then we will be in full swing.  The Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye can be as early as 65 days but my plant did not set early and then I lost most of the first set to BER.

The ritual of the first tomato sandwich is something I look forward to starting in late winter.  It is something I plan for months in advance.  It cannot be taken for granted and it cannot be rushed.  I can't have just any old bread.  For me it should be a thick white bread, not whole grain.  Most recently I have been choosing Pepperidge Farms Farmhouse Butter Bread. There should be liberal application of mayonnaise, my long time friend's family secret recipe seasoning salt, and oregano.

I slice the tomato so as to have two fillet cuts from the center.  Some of the larger, more oblate tomatoes only yield one center cut but it will be enough for a whole sandwich.  The Carbon appears to be rounder, more of a hamburger slicer than a whopper, sandwich slicer so it took two slices to fill a sandwich.  The shoulders are discarded.  The skin of the Carbone was on the tough side and the cracked shoulders were inedible anyway.  But the blossom end left over is for tasting.  This is where you will get the most concentrated example of the tomato's taste.  Take a bite and wait for the subtle yet complex flavors to develop.  Add a little seasoning salt and take another bite.

My mind flipped through a slide show of months of anticipation, seed catalogs, grow lights, weather reports and tending.  I compared it to memories and expectations, smells and tastes...

This thing that Nature and I had created.

And it was good.

🍅

A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

 Nothing major going on in the garden this week.  Just a lot of little projects perking along

Tomorrow I will have tomato on my lunch salad.

For several years I have been reading how I'm "growing zucchini all wrong and once you stake your zucchini you will never go back to letting them sprawl on the ground".  

Well I didn't have a problem with the form of my zucchini plants.  The plants were healthy and if you plant two seeds at a time you get a nice symmetrical mound.  But if you never try new things you never improve on things.  So I stuck an extra Titan Tomato Cage around one zucchini plant and.... I like it! 

I'm not saying I will stake them and prune them into topiaries, but I can see the benefit of growing them vertically.

The sauerkraut made enough brine to fully submerge itself within a couple of hours.  

I just needed to be patient.

The Too Many Peas are all shelled and drying.

Next year I will not have to order pea seed.

Random shot of the House from the driveway side

Random shot of the Garden Shed

The pole beans look really rough on the bottom.  REALLY rough.

 But we are getting plenty of nice beans and I have already started putting some away in the freezer.

Better looking beans plants are on the horizon

I needed to thin the Siberian Irises around our water well.

It has been a few years since I did this and they were an impacted mound with too many weeds.  This mix originally was supposed to have seven different colors, but the medium blue ones always take over.  The one corner had at least two shades of blue and some yellow so I removed everything else and then redistributed what was left, trimming them back to keep them up off the lawn.  I will probably plant some elsewhere and maybe even pot some up.   I have LOTS.

Much tidier now with room to grow

The sweet corn is looking very promising

And so is the second planting of cucumbers

The pear tree is holding five pears and they are getting pretty big.

I wasn't sure if the Gypsy broccoli was going to put out any side shoots, but it finally is.  I picked enough for a lunch salad before I took this picture.

Was it Worth It?

 Now I'm not saying our local farm stands don't have good Sweet Corn, but back in 2018 every one was raving about our local sweet corn and we didn't find any to be very good at all.  Tough.  Bland.  Despite the great convenience of having someone else do the growing and figuring out when to pick, I decided I had to grow my own.  

Last year I tried the Gotta Have It which I had previous experience with.  This year I also tried this SS3778R (F1) sh2 that's a lot of numbers and letters!  A month ago this whole bed went flat in a burst of wind and I began to question my sanity.  Was it worth it? Trying to grow a crop like sweet corn in raised beds?  

Totally!

  This corn was awesome!

I have a nice full bed of it and there are a lot of ears.

Nice big ears.  Two to a stalk in most cases.

The other bed which has Gotta Have It is not doing anywhere near as well.  It has about a third of the ears and they aren't developing very fast.  The stalks are awesome.  And I make sure I water the bed (along with the other) at least every three days because it has been so hot and dry.  We'll see how it turns out.

The fact that I didn't write a blog entry last weekend is indicative of my general malaise and lack of enthusiasm.  Not just with gardening, but life in general.   I spent a couple of days this past week trying to remember what "fun" was. Since Covid-19 has wrung all of the fun out of this summer.  But then I decided this is fun. I got past my summer burn out. 

I work in an essential industry (gas and oil) and have my own private office (nearest coworkers are hours away) so my work routine has been completely uninterrupted.  I take every Friday off from May through July.  I am now down to every other Friday through the end of the year.  That's how I burn up vacation time without being missed and having work pile up.  Everyone gets used to me not being available Fridays.  

I didn't have last Friday off so I was looking forward to today.  Yesterday at the office I wrote up a long list of heavy duty chores like weed whacking and pulling out cucumbers.  When I looked at my list this morning I knew this would be one of those days where you sweat all the way through your clothes and at the end of the day you barely have the energy to get out of them and into the shower.  And I love days like that.

I've finally gotten past the point where all of the cauliflower and cucumbers and cabbages were sitting in the fridge demanding to be eaten.  Things are much more manageable now.  I've been keeping up with my garden housekeeping very well.  I've cleaned 4 beds out and planted them with buckwheat.

The earliest buckwheat has gotten quite tall.  Last year the buckwheat crop in this bed below was very yellow and sparse.  I've taken special care with the soil and it is now doing as well as the other beds.  That is an unsung advantage of planting cover crops.  You can compare the health and fertility of different beds against each other.

It is finally tomato season.  I've been eating mid-sized Black Brandywine tomatoes since the first of August, but my Barlow Jap Tomatoes have finally begun and they are the best they have ever been.  

Four big, beautiful Barlow Japs all ripe at once.

The Barlow Jap plant is healthy as can be.  I've only done some structural pruning on branches that were not in a spot where I could support them.  It has barely shown any sign of Septorial Speck or Blight. The Pineapple tomato (below) on the other hand has had a big problem with Septorial and I pulled two Black Brandywine I had in beds because they were blighting out faster than the tomatoes could ripen.

The Black Brandywine plant in the container (below) is still healthy and producing well.  Just a little bit of leaf curl.  This is my first year for this variety and I have to say the taste is very good.  For black or brown tomatoes I still prefer the Paul Robeson overall.  But I'm enjoying them this year.  They are a little on the small side for a beefstake.  It takes two slices to fill a sandwich.  They are the perfect size for topping a hamburger.

Well that catches me up on my garden blogging.  Tomorrow I am actually going to clean the house! And learn how to shell baby Lima Beans.  I've been experimenting one pod at a time in the garden but its time to pick a bunch and I still haven't worked out a good method.  Luckily, if I fail at shelling babies, I can always let them mature on the vine and store them dry.  But its the baby limas I'm interested in.