A Cooperative Learning Project
Zucchini. Looking a bit battered- hopefully it won’t make a difference when it gets a bigger.
Tomatoes changing color. I think these are the grape tomatoes, in which case they are turning red, or maybe they’re the Sungold cherry tomatoes turning yellow.
Peppers- these look like chili peppers rather than bell peppers.
Shell peas, finally. Yummy.
We harvested one red cabbage Saturday. But some cabbage plants looked like they were not going to do much. So the decision was made to cull the runts. Most of these had cutworm collars, leading one gardener to speculate that maybe cutworm collars somehow stunt the growth. However, it was pointed out that the cutworm collars, placed about a week and a half after the seedlings were planted, were placed especially around those seedlings having trouble. One wonders at why some cabbages did better than others. Was it the transplanting? (i.e. some rootlets might have been more disturbed than others) Was it some early attack on the seedling by a pest? Or was it just that some do better than others?
Meanwhile, the tomato committee appropriated the liberated area.
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.
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.
I opened the garden at 5:50 last evening and soon left to go to collect produce donations at the farmers’ market.
In just my 20 minutes, several intrigued people came by, the adults usually more interested than the children.
When I returned at 15 before 7, Lisa and Bailey and daughter were there. We tried some of the radishes: The regular ones split from the rain like cherry tomatoes, but were good. Of the big ones, one was OK, but the biggest one was riddled with wire worms.
Tuesday when I was there for a moment in time, a man liked our garden but then didn’t think the snow fence was so attractive, but I said well, it was recycled and was practical.
Dick today at Johnnies told me that one day this week when he was there, an older woman, an experienced gardener, informed him the collards were ready and should be harvested now, lest they get old and tough.
While I was at the garden this morning, doing surgery on the soaker hose (2X more holes now), a handsome, boxy 5-ft-5 grandmother, maybe in her early 70s, came over with her 2-year-old grandkid (or was it great-grandkid?) to admire the garden.
We connected quickly. She pointed around the place, calling off all the veggies she had growing in her own garden. Then, hand out level with her shoulder, she said in a thick eastern European accent: “My tomatoes are much taller; they’re cherries; and they produce lots.” Then she smiled.
I thought, "This lady knows tomatoes," and told her that some of mine at home were still only 4 to 5 inches high.
Then the gentle, between-friends scold began.
“Why haven’t you picked those yet?” she said, pointing to the collard greens. “Another week and those leaves will be hard. You don’t want that."
"You’ve got to pick them now," she said. "Boil them first, then fry them with a little olive oil. They will taste very good.”
“But do it now,” she repeated, poking the air before me with her finger. “Don’t let them get hard.”
I promised I’d pass her admonitions on to the crew tomorrow evening, when we get together for our mid-week shift.
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