eggplant

Eggplants: plants not robust, wormy fruit, poor yield – too much water? soil too cool?
Peppers: similar problems as eggplant, but not as bad, try growing a few in pots?
Potatoes: very good, do again
Tomatillos: did very well, some potato beetle damage, harvest later than usual
Tomatoes: not a great year, Green Zebra, Garden Treasure & Rutgers died early, Juliet & Sun Gold did well, leave more of the suckers? Try some plants in pots? Fertilize more?

Our seventh year of gardening year began with the January seed meeting, followed by some excellent research for new varieties in February. March saw the first seedlings started indoors and opening day at the garden. In April, the final 2 (of 12) main garden beds were double-dug, and our first seeds (and seedlings) went into the garden.

In May, we discovered a rabbit's nest in some knee-high winter rye, causing a delay in planting our bush beans. (All bunnies successfully fledged and eventually graduated out of the garden.) For the first time, we started sweet potato slips from our previous-year's tubers and experimented with row cover on the Swiss chard.

Drought was significant for most of the season. Watering seemed relentless, especially in early summer when many young seedlings were getting established. Our carrots suffered, tomatoes were once again a target for thirsty wildlife and (for the first time) our eggplants were targeted.

June saw a bountiful crop of peas, our earliest cherry tomatoes ever, and the best-looking spring broccoli and bok choi to date. Sadly, our okra seedlings struggled… and the seedlings purchased to replace them didn't fare much better. In July, we harvested our best-ever garlic, along with our earliest summer squash and full-sized tomatoes.

August was abundant, and graced us with another beautiful crop of bok choi. Yet, we suffered disappointment when our onions died off before reaching full size. September (always our most productive month) saw the additional payoff of our pelleted seed experiment, with our best crop of parsnips to date.

October saw our last harvests of tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, and our first harvests of cauliflower and sweet potatoes. Garlic (reserved from our June harvest) was replanted in November, which also saw the last harvest for most crops. We enjoyed lettuce and arugula (under plastic) through mid-December and hardy collards and kale through the end of the year.

Eggplants: early critter predation (due to drought), staking important, Italian variety excellent, Orient Express quicker to harvest and larger plants, but less cold hardy than Ping Tung Long
Peppers: too many hot types (more sweet types, lose Anaheim & Jalapeno?, try Padron?, bigger Thai variety?)
Tomatillos: not as productive as usual, possibly due to following (alleopathic) Jerusalem artichokes, no beetle damage
Tomatoes: seedlings planted too far from stakes (try 4-5”), Garden Gem did poorly, Juliette did very well, Green Giant was strange

July always feels like a time of transition in the garden. The summer squashes, tomatoes and peppers have begun producing, the spring peas, potatoes and garlic are coming out and the fall brassicas, beans and turnips are going in.

Quite a few of the garden beds are transitioning from one crop to another: peas to pole beans, garlic to turnips, fava beans to cauliflower, potatoes to broccoli, and onions to salad turnips.

There are also succession plantings of the same crop in some garden beds: fall carrots have been seeded between the rows of spring carrots and bok choi has been replanted between the few remaining spring plants.

The least appealing aspect of this time of year is doing battle with the mid-season diseases and pests. Squash vine borers have made their appearance, along with the first signs of mildew.

And this year's drought has increased the wildlife damage to our tomatoes and eggplants. We seriously need some rain!

Eggplant: seedlings slow to get started in garden, Italian variety (Galine) perfect, white type did well, Ping Tung Long plants stayed small – try more productive variety?

Peppers: all varieties (including many new ones) did great, stake plants earlier next year, check seed source for poblano – not quite right, try Hot Lemon & Thai Dragon in pots next year?

Tomatoes: Heirlooms / disease-resistant Hybrids ratio good, Serenade experiment worth repeating – get a new sprayer
Cherry types: Sun Gold good, Matt’s Wild Cherry too small – go back to Super Sweet 100s next year
Sauce types: Juliet good, Tiren odd – try a different variety or just grow Juliet
Standard types: Most did well, Bolseno & Ramapo best, Cherokee Purple was bad, Green Zebra was lackluster

Tomatillos: crop survived and produced lots of small fruit, seedlings savagely attacked by 3-Lined Potato Beetles – move next year & use row cover on newly-planted seedlings

Elisabeth and I have developed a system for the seedlings we start indoors.  She has a cold basement and a shady backyard.  I have a warm basement and a good-sized sunny patch in my backyard.  She starts the cool weather seedlings (like the brassicas) in her basement, and I start the warm weather seedlings (like the nightshades) in my basement.  When the seedlings are ready to go outside, they go first to her backyard, and then to mine.

Today was transfer day for most of the warm weather seedlings, from her backyard to mine.  My car was completely filled (the back, the floors, and all the seats except the driver’s seat) with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillos.  It did all fit, but barely.

Slow, shaky start for seedlings due to cold conditions – start seedlings in warmer place

Eggplant: slow with low yield – find early prolific varieties (Mangan, Galine), fertilize more, black plastic?
Peppers: most did well, despite vandal damage – grow greater variety of types
Tomatoes: best yield to date, good mix of types, resistant varieties did best, red plastic and CDs worked well – consider taller, better support structure next year, don’t plant sickly seedlings
Cherry types: grow Sun Gold & Super Sweet 100 again, possibly grow Green Grape again
Sauce types: probably grow Amish Paste & Verona again, grew well, but some had a hard interior
Standard types: grow Ramapo, Red October & Bolseno again (2 plants each), maybe grow Pink Beauty (sweet & productive, but crapped out early) & Druzba (productive, but one plant hit by disease)
Specialty types: Green Zebra & Red Zebra did badly, again – find a resistant variety
Tomatillos: purple and green varieties did well, slightly smaller fruit – grow just green?

Q: Why did we plant the tomatoes through red plastic mulch this year?

A: It's an experiment. According to a UMass Extension report on the use of plastic mulches "Researchers at the USDA and Clemson University noted that certain crops performed better when grown in red mulch as opposed to black mulch: tomatoes, which yielded 20% more fruit; basil, the leaves of which had greater area, succulence, and fresh weight; and strawberries, which smelled better, tasted sweeter, and yielded a larger harvest. Penn State researchers found yield increases for tomatoes and eggplants on red mulch compared to black. Anecdotally, gardeners in Berkshire County saw marked increase in overall plant size, fruit size, and yield of tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers when plants were grown in red mulch as opposed to straw mulch."

We have noted that weeds are growing under the mulch, which might be a problem later in the season.

The particular perforated product we are trying is "Better Reds", by Dalen Gardener, about $8-10 for 8 3'x3' sheets.

Eggplant: Italian, Asian & White, plants less robust – result of weather or fertilizing or location in garden?
Peppers: the best year ever, all varieties (bells, poblanos & chilis) did well – repeat varieties, staging
Tomatoes: many suffered from diseases, good long yield from remaining plants – grow more resistant varieties next year, cover soil with landscape fabric to warm it before planting, experiment with clover groundcover, repeat sucker experiment, plant some in lettuce bed, try a grafted plant, more normal-size varieties & fewer zebras next year?
     SMALL: Sun Gold*, Super Sweet 100*, Green Grape*  
     MEDIUM: Mountain Magic, Stupice^, Ramapo*, Paul Robeson^, Green Zebra^, Red Zebra^
     SAUCE: Granadero, Mariana*
     * varieties we should definitely consider next year
     ^ varieties that failed
Tomatillos: grew well, caging worked great – try one purple plant, start seeds a week or two later than tomatoes next year

It was a lovely weekend in October and we happened to be in Washington when the White House held their Fall Garden Tours. The opportunity to see Michelle Obama’s famous Kitchen Garden was simply too wonderful to pass up. We braved the long lines and got such a treat!

The kitchen garden is in a clearing on the south lawn of the White House (circled in red on the brochure). The plan is L shaped, though it has changed somewhat over the years. The plan shown here (sporting the First Family dog, Bo) was from the first year: 2009.

The garden is fastidiously tended and initially, the planting beds were at grade. They’ve since transitioned to raised wooden beds. The pathways are mulched with bluestone stepping stones on the main paths.

Even in October, the garden was going strong! We saw tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, lettuce, mustard, pac choi, cauliflower, parsley, Brussels sprouts, squash, collards, tomatillos, broccoli, beans, basil, ginger and many herbs. There were also a few things we weren’t close enough to recognize.

A section of the garden is dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, with the plants grown from seed passed down through the generations at his home Monticello.

One really can’t overstress the importance of the White House Kitchen Garden. Without this highly influential effort, many community gardens – such as ours – may never have gotten off the ground.

It started cloudy, but as gardeners arrived, the sun came out in full force.  Despite being past 9AM, the far left corner still had a bit of shade from the tall trees at the edge of the Park.

A white board of to-do activities, prepared by the planners, organizes our work.  It’s harvesting time!  Lush eggplant of both the long Asian and the fat Italian varieties are joyfully picked.  Bush beans of all three colors –green, yellow, purple– are available, but the soybeans are not yet ready.  Some summer squash, several cucumbers.  A debate ensues over how much lettuce to pick, as what we may leave behind may bolt or turn bitter in the hot weather.  Our next generation of seedlings were only planted last week, so are not ready for transplant to take the place of the picked lettuce.  We also planted more lettuce today.  Collard greens are plentifully abundant, although many gardeners prefer the swiss chard.

There is much promise of more to come.  The tall corn displays purple and golden tassels.  Immature pumpkins and watermelons hide in the trellis of leaves.  We added more support (netting them with plastic mesh) to some of them.  The winter squash has plenty of flowers, and the Jerusalem artichokes are blooming.  The sunflowers seemed to have shaken off the early-season leaf eaters, and are climbing high.  And even the weeds are prospering, encroaching from the paths even as the vegetables encroach onto the paths.  We’ll have to do something about that.

We applied a spray of a small amount of potassium bicarbonate mixed with water to the squash and watermelon plants.  Unlike the last two years, we’ve seen no mildew, so getting an early start at prevention seems to have worked.  We did a pH test of the soil near the tomatoes, and added some lime.  We’re watching closely for signs of blossom end-rot.

Given yesterday’s rain, the compost was deemed too wet to sift and extract, even though one pile is clearly ready.  Instead, we turned both piles, to feed them air.

Water, water, water, says one of the garden planners, who says the fruiting plants (e.g. tomatoes and eggplants) especially want it.  No one saw any pests, like the tomato horn worm of last week, and we have some bees buzzing around our flowers.

Not everything picked is 100% perfect.  One tomato did not pass the eat-me test.  Some parsnips decided to stop growing down after they encountered some rocks.

The biggest surprise of the day was the lack of visitors.  Normally we get about twenty, divided between adults and children.

As the white board gets all checked off, people gather for tea, and we start the divvy-up process, a mix today of some things in piles and other things (like greens) taken in turns.  Herbs like rosemary and chives are taken separately by those who want them.

As we finish near Noon, the sun decides to go behind the clouds again.

Thanks to the Landreth Seed Co. for the following info:

This is a ‘heads-up’. It is not meant to alarm or frighten. The intent is to educate and inform.

During the 2012 gardening season, blight is going to be a problem. Early season, mid season and late season blight are going to be a problem for tomatoes and potatoes and possibly eggplants. The moisture that inundated the United States east coast with Hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee and the extraordinarily mild winter have combined to create an unusually comfortable environment for the proliferation of blight spores.

Blight is a fungus transmitted by spores which can lay dormant in soil and be carried by the wind as much as 50 miles in a day. Under ideal conditions spores can germinate in ½ hour. The last great outbreak was in 2009, but 2012 may also be a record year.

For those of you who intend to grow tomato, potato or eggplant plants, you MUST take precautions early even if you are organic gardeners. Landreth suggests that you use copper fungicide, a fungicide approved for organic farming. Use the powder form of copper fungicide. Copper fungicide is sold at most garden centers. Dust the soil where you are going to plant your tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants and till the dust into the soil. On the day you plant your seedlings, dust the seedlings, and repeat this dusting every two weeks, for two more dustings.

If you observe signs of blight later in the season, (a spotting of the lower leaves and stems), dust the plants immediately and repeat the dusting in 5-7 days. Copper fungicide is very effective. If you follow the suggested protocols your plants will probably be okay. If you do nothing, or if you wait until late July or August to address this issue, you may lose your entire potato, tomato or eggplant crop.

Unfortunately, we did not know to take the above precautionary measures at the beginning of our gardening season, but it now appears that we may have late blight hitting our potatoes.  A few of the plant stems have rotted and collapsed, so we removed them from the garden and destroyed them.  We then dug to see what, if any, potatoes may have been formed on the diseased plants.  Our gold potato plant yielded only two small (1-2") tubors, while our red potato plant yielded a few small tubors, and eight very small (less than 1") tubors.  Many of the remaining plants are showing signs of blight — brown spots on their leaves, and major wilting, so we will begin dusting with copper dust fungicide.

Photo of Late Blight on Potato:  plantdiagnostics.umd.edu/_media/client/diagnostics/fullsize/late_blight_potato_l.jpg

For more info on Late Blight:  www.ag.ndsu.edu/extplantpath/plant-pest-alerts/potato-tomato-late-blight-start-monitoring-early

For info on using copper dust to control early or late blight, or other plant diseases, go to www.bonide.com/lbonide/backlabels/l771.pdf

You may find the Landreth Seed Co. at:  www.landrethseeds.com/

Altogether, close to 90 exuberant, inquisitive, and pretty well-behaved students attended one of three 25-minute classes this morning at the Veggie School in Robbins Farm Garden.

We talked about different veggies’ origins, the different parts the plant we eat with different vegetables, what kinds of bugs we like and don’t like and why, and what were our favorite and least favorite veggies.

Tops in students’ favorites were tomatoes and carrots, with onions coming in third. Least liked in general were beets and eggplant, though most everyone agreed that the deep-purple eggplants were among the most beautiful vegetables in the garden.

The few students repeating from last week marveled at how some of the garden’s plants had grown, like the three squashes (pattipan, crookneck and zucchini), the cucumbers, and especially the sunflowers, reaching now to almost 9 feet tall.

I opened the garden for an hour and a half yesterday afternoon. Though there were dramatic rains in both Lexington and Boston, none here! Even so, the garden looked well watered.

A nice group of Asian-American mothers and children came to visit. They remarked on the eggplants (great purple blossoms), the amaranth, and the tomatoes. Earlier a mother with two daughters enjoyed finding the hidden zucchini. Several people took the cards.

I tried to draw the amaranth and the basil, impossible as usual.

When we first opened the garden, we had the soil tested, and the pH (acid/alkaline balance) was very low, about 5.8. We added 170 lbs of lime when we dug it up – about 17 lbs/100 sf. We checked the soil again on June 26 in a few spots around the garden, and the pH was around 6.6, which is just about perfect for most vegetables. It takes a while for the lime we added in April to change the soil chemistry, so we wanted to verify that we’d added enough. Every time it rains, the soil becomes a little more acid, so we need to keep checking and adjusting throughout the season.

We lightly dusted lime around the plants that have a sweet tooth (cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, beets and greens). Some plants (potatoes, eggplant) like it a bit more acidic, so we did not add any lime to those beds.

We used calcitic lime (plain ordinary powdered limestone, or calcium carbonate) because it adds a quick shot of calcium to the soil, to help prevent blossom end rot on the tomatoes.

Soil pH is important because plants won’t absorb nutrients from the soil as well if the pH is too high or too low. A good introduction to soil pH is here, on the UMass Extension web site.

Did you know that farmers used to check their pH by tasting the soil?

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.

Saturday we planted cucumber seeds, 2 at a time, in 2-foot intervals along either side of the compost bins. We waited till now because cucumbers don’t like cool soil. They are not as finicky as tomatoes and eggplants, the prima donnas that go in next week, but they are real pansies compared, say, to radishes and peas.

Back 120 years ago, cucumbers were a luxury vegetable, served mostly in high-priced hotels like the Parker House over in Boston. At that time, Arlington was the cucumber capital of the United States. It was home to the country’s most famous slicing cucumber, the Arlington White Spine, a great- great-grandchild of which we have just planted here.

Arlington farmers grew cukes during the winter months and early spring in greenhouses, where they kept the soil and the air warm with a combination of steam boilers and daily infusions of horse manure from carriage operators over in Cambridge.

Off-season, for special events, Arlington cukes fetched as much $1 each from wealthy Bostonians. During the summer months they could still get as much as 40 cents each. (To convert those prices into reasonable estimates in today’s dollars, multiply by 22. That’s the Consumer Price Index multiplier for 1913, the first year for which the index was established.)

Eventually the Arlington White Spine fell out of favor as a retail cucumber, though it still goes strong as a breeder. How it lost its position in grocery stores is a long story, one we’ll tell you later sometime. As a breeder, however, Arlington White Spine  remains the Man ‘o War of slicers, claiming more direct descendents than almost any other rival.