We have harvested tasty young leaves from our collards and kale plants nearly every week over the past 2 months. They're now at a point where they look like a plantation of tiny palm trees.
Irrigation
If we plan to use drip irrigation in the future, lay it out before planting, then plant the seedlings next to the emitters. Trying to snake a soaker around full-grown squash and tomato plants was not the best practice.
Consider setting up some kind of small rain barrel or cistern or any kind of bucket-with-a-hose-fitting-on-the-bottom to feed drip lines. We can’t collect much rainwater without a roof and gutters, but we can fill a container from the hose and let it drain out slowly through drip lines to plants that like even moisture, like tomatoes.
Shockingly Prolific
Blossom End Rot
On Monday, I discovered that our mystery tomato plant (which clearly seems to be a plum tomato of some sort) had tomatoes that had blossom end rot. In my container garden, this is usually solved by an application of lime. It seem like for tomatoes in the ground this is caused by a lack of calcium uptake by the plant caused by uneven watering. We need to pay more attention to watering the tomatoes. Odd, however, that this seems to be occurring on only 1 of our tomato plants.
Tomato Hornworms Spotted
Today we spotted our first tomato hornworms munching on our tomato plants. These bugs are incredibly destructive- look at the size of this one- Elisabeth’s hand is behind it for comparison!
This one had been colonized by the eggs of a parasitic wasp:
This is what they will do- strip all the leaves off of a tomato plant.
Garden from Space
Google’s done some new satellite photos. The water line is in and it looks like the tomatoes were just planted. I’m guessing Memorial Day or thereabouts.
