Yesterday, I opened the garden from about 2-5. Perhaps a dozen families, maybe 15 or 16 even, visited, expressing a lot of admiration. We are really looking pretty sharp, not a weed to be seen! Thanks Michael (and others)! My routine is to walk up to the playground and invite people down. A few families come on their own, or are walking by. Some were interested enough that I invited them to come by Saturday when everyone is there. A number took cards, and I gave out some peas here and there.
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Determinant and indeterminant
I’ve heard the words of my headline tossed around the garden this spring, figuring they meant something but not getting the concepts entirely. But I think I have it now, and it’s worth sharing. (Or so I think; you decide.)
The times I’ve heard the terms tossed, the subject was tomatoes. According to this tomato-growing site, determinant varieties, including the well-known Roma variety, grow to a roughly defined height, stop growing when the fruit sets at the end of each branch, ripen about the same time, and then die.
Indeterminants keep growing until frost — flowering, setting fruit, and ripening all at the same time, on different stalks.
Recently, my gardening mate Michael Smith, who horticultures for a living, shared a brief film on pinching out young tomato-plant branches that I later realized are what others call "suckers," another term I’d heard but didn’t quite grasp. (There’s a lot of that for me in the presence of actual gardeners.)
After watching, I went out into my own garden and pinched — or clipped — all the suckers, which are identified as growths emanating from the juncture of the main stem and a side shoot. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that these suckers will make the plants bushier, bringing no advantage, at the expense of energy that would better be applied to the fruit.
Then I noticed that my eggplant plants also have suckers, and wondered if I should cut them out, too. Luckily, I didn’t. I asked around among the gardeners and got no definitive answer, though one guy said he thought it made sense, and another observed that both tomatoes and eggplants are from the nightshade family.
Turns out, according to a consensus of websites I found, though none authoritative enough that I’d link to, that eggplants are determinant, so every branch I cut off would just be limiting yield, instead of concentrating energy in the "right" places.
There still remains the question of whether all eight of my tomato plants are indeterminants. That’s something I ought to know, but don’t.
A garden’s bounty
Curly Kale : Mary Ellen . . . Red Cabbage : Elizabeth . . . Russian Kale : Michael
Garden guests share pointers on potatoes
Zucchinis
Not much to report on zucchinis so far. They went in on May 22 (pictured above) next to summer squash, in a plot that previously was all radish and lettuce. A border of radishes remains, as do some lettuces that we took outer leaves from on Wednesday.
Tomato liberation day
Though the sign announcing the home of our tomatoes was accurate (above), you had to know what you were looking for, since the first crop to go into that plot was watermelon radishes (left and right of top photo).
Last Saturday, the 19th, said radishes were harvested, ceding the tomatoes their designated territory (below).
Knowing that the radishes would be leaving before the tomatoes really got going, we crowded the tomato plants into the radish greenery. But it wasn’t until the radishes were removed that I realized how severe the crowding was. I don’t know what the tomatoes’ reactions were, but I exhaled sighs of relief once they had their space all to themselves.
THIS JUST IN: I’d reported earlier that we’d spotted in a couple of "extra" tomato plants in the brassica bed, where a couple of plants had failed to flourish, but it now appears we’ll be adding three more tomato plants as well.
Wednesday night, for fear that our best looking cauliflower was close to flowering, we pulled it from its brassica home. I believe i that space, and a couple other cauliflower spaces, that the tomatoes are going to take over.
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