Almost fall

After a period of cooler temperatures, both frightening and exciting, summer seems to have started up again. But the front garden knows that fall is coming.

At the top of the stairs, the cucumbers and tomatoes are fading.

The cucumbers have gotten mildew, though I don't know if it's downy or powdery. I suspect powdery.

Mildewed cucumber!

I haven't done anything about it, since we're trying to be organic here, and the plants out back are fine. I'll probably just pull the two plants out front and replace them with something for the fall. The only problem is choosing between broccoli and sugar snap peas. Sugar snap peas would usually win, since they're guaranteed to do well and I love them, but I'd like to try at least one broccoli plant out front.

At least the third wave of beans is going well.

Provider bush bean flowers.

Edamame pods.

It looks like I'll get more, and bigger, beans from the 10 or so plants out front than from all of the summer ones out back. I'm developing a serious dislike of the mulberry tree that gives the shadier bed out back its name.

In the back there's never much to report, as it's mostly tomato plants chugging along, doing their late summer thing but at a slooow pace. The last minute bed I threw all of my extras into turned out to be a very good move.

It's a mess in the back, where the stakes keep falling over, but the plants don't seem to mind too much and have been supplying a steady stream of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, with some Black Krims that might make it to maturity. This bed has never even had a suspicious, blighty looking leaf show up.

And a whackload of harvest pictures since I haven't been keeping up.

More sun in back, and a first tomato

This week the neighbors to the west mowed down the weeds along the fence. For reference this is what it looked like earlier in the summer

July 29th, two weeks ago.

and what it looks like now.

August 11th, this afternoon.

I'm hoping that more sun will help the plants along, especially the herbs at the edge of the sunnier bed which have been shaded by tomatoes and weeds since June. I'm also hoping that more air and less shade makes the backyard a little less hospitable to mosquitoes.

Some of the larger tomatoes are ripening, finally.

All of the full sized tomatoes in the back are black krims except for this one plant I picked up at the farmer's market. I can't remember what the variety is but I chose it because it said they didn't get too big. They're also meant to be pinkish when ripe, not bright red.

This year I only grew cherry tomatoes out front, since they do better in containers, but next year I might put a couple of larger plants out front. Mid-August is a long time to wait for the first real tomato, for this area at least. I'm also going to beg, borrow, or steal some equipment to prune back the trees, which haven't been touched a couple of years (except for the one taken down after Sandy).

And finally, before I head back outside to enjoy the rest of the day, what we've been picking and eating lately.

Wednesday, August 7th. (Taken at night, so terrible lighting.)

Thursday, August 8th.

Sunday, August 11th.

Blending together

Summer garden updates sure do run together after a while. Even the newest seedlings aren't quite the miracle they were back in March. One magical thing the summer does have are the harvests:

July 27th

July 29th 

This morning (August 2nd already!)

The first eggplant got used on a pizza that same night. That photo also includes lettuce and arugula, a rare sight since it's usually eaten directly after it's picked. Sometime I should detail what happens with the food, especially since this might not count as a real gardening blog until I post a photo of homemade pickles.

Yesterday and last night were rainy and sometimes windy, and that combined with not visiting the back garden since Tuesday meant I lost out on a few cherry tomatoes.

Poor fallen tomatoes.

Between the unsalvageable fallen tomatoes and a few that had split open on the plants I'm down a whole handful, but the price of good food is eternal vigilance and apparently I'm not always ready to pay.

I also lost my most recent eggplant blossom, which you can make out on the ground in the photo below.

I'm not sure why it fell off, hopefully some of the other nascent flowers will soon bloom to make up for it.

In other news out back I think the older soybean plants are on their way out.

Older plants are on the right, with yellowing leaves and bean pods.

There are quite a few pods that never filled out, and most of the ones that did have been fairly small. Next time they'll go someplace else, even if it's outside of the protected beds. They're one plant the cats and squirrels don't seem to bother once they're big enough.

Some of the latest cucumber out back are coming in oddly shaped, varying thickness along their length. This is a bad picture to show what I mean, but the adolescent cucumber below is sort of gourd shaped, something that hasn't happened to the front cucumbers.

I can't imagine how bored any NSA or CIA operatives would be if they had to trawl through records of my googling: fallen eggplant blossoms, weird cucumber shape, how to tell when edamame is ripe.

I take it all back

Yesterday, not 12 hours after I wrote about how worried I was about the transplanted eggplant, it had already started to perk up. And today not only is the stem lifted up from the side of the pot but all four of the green beans I planted in the same pot have sprouted.

Recovering eggplant.

Baby "Provider" bush beans. You can't quite see the fourth one from this angle but the stem is pushing up the dirt between the left and middle seedlings.

In fact the whole front was looking pretty nice this morning, after the rainy day we had yesterday.

Of course by early afternoon everything was dried out and droopy, but nothing 4 gallons of water couldn't fix.

In the back things are chugging along, slowly. There's a bunch of new cucumbers starting out, and a few tiny black krims just getting started. It's a relief to see that some blossoms made it through the heat wave, though full sized tomatoes take their time back there so it'll be some time before the real celebration.

My second planting of edamame have been flowering and setting fruit too, but I'll be lucky to get much from that bed.

At least three edamame pods and more to come.

Behind the high tech bean trellis you can see the empty space where the fall broccoli and brussels sprouts will go, along with a new trellis at the other end.

On the right side there's a sweet potato vine and on the left I've wrapped a regular potato plant around the string. The bamboo holding this up is 5' tall; this is what happens when you plant potatoes in the shade.

In the back

Finally, finally, I got around to picking up some bamboo stakes for the tomatoes out back. Of course I still need more but it's, like, 110 degrees or so and kind of a hassle to bike to home depot for more. So this happened in the sunnier bed:

Sunnier bed, with staked up tomatoes at last.

Towards the back you can make out the tips of the 6' stakes and closer to the front are some 5' stakes (there was only one package of 6' ones available). In front are cucumbers, that are climbing over everything, and two eggplants that have barely grown since I transplanted them in... mid-May?

In addition to the cherry tomatoes which have been growing and ripening for a few weeks now, there are real tomatoes too.

In the center, a future black krim.

Also quite a few baby cucumbers, but that's about it. Out front the eggplant has flowered but back here it's still waiting to make its move.

The shadier bed is pretty boring by comparison, since I ripped out all of the brassicas except for two cabbages that started heading up, though I doubt they'll do much.

Shadier bed.

There are still some edamame growing, and a couple of the sweet potatoes towards the fence are getting a little viney, but the middle of the bed is cleared for fall plants.

More stakes are needed for the other bed, which has all of its tomato, and potato for that matter, plants flopped left and right. There are a few staked up in the back row, but the front is a mess.

The bonus bed.

On the left is a literal pile of tomato plant limbs and on the right there's potato plants leaning over the edge of the bed.

I wish there more detailed shots but I started taking pictures after watering which roused the mosquitoes from whatever portal to hell they had been waiting in, so the back garden tour got cut short. However I remembered to take pictures of what I harvested this time!

There's a cucumber, a few cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of unripe ground cherries that had fallen already. I actually harvested a similar size cucumber on Friday, the first this year, but forgot to document until it was halfway eaten. Someday I'll remember to take a photo when I'm bringing in a bunch of herbs and lettuce and scallions and such.

The fig situation

This is the parent of the fig tree I have in a container on the front steps.

It's been cut down to ground level at least twice in the past two years but always comes back.

June 7th, almost a month ago.

I don't know what the landlord has against it, as it seems like the only useful tree back there, but then the casual observer might find my intense hatred of the mulberry trees back there irrational as well. After all they're only lovely, oxygen-making trees, right? And mulberries are useful too! (What you don't understand is that's what they want you to think.)

As you see, cutting it down just gets you tons of little tree starts, right now spread out in a little fig wall. Last year this was two main trunks that did sort of block the pathway, but nothing like this. If I do get some fruit this year maybe I can identify the type and become a fig tree farmer. Selling little trees for $5 a pop, there's gotta be at least $50 right here...

Total garden update

Out front I've been picking one or two strawberries from time to time. I only have six plants and four of them I pinched back the flowers on so the roots could get more established. The other main crops out there are basil and dill. Below is this spring and summer's basil compared with the much yellower and smaller basil that I've had going inside all winter.

Also pictured: fig tree, flowering lemon basil, strawberry.

There's also been some poppies flowering and a lone cosmos (not pictured) although the plants themselves are huge. Too much nitrogen? I have to admit I don't pay much attention to that pot, even though I'd love to have more flowers. And there are ground cherries forming! This plant has been pretty chewed up by, I think, flea beetles, you can see a lot of holes in the leaves below.

On the back deck the baby lettuces and arugula are chugging along, big enough to munch on. I also moved the flooded drawer and put my winter parsley and some burnt up pansies in it. The pansies have flowered but the got really damaged by the sun and heat when they were out front so I doubt they're long for this world.

Lettuce on left, arugula to the right. 

Parsley and pansies.

The winter arugula I moved from inside has flowered, which I've never had happen before. Maybe I'll be able to collect seed?

Hard to see with all that green in the background.

Then downstairs things are really happening. First I ended up throwing all my leftover starts into one of the landlords' beds (after clearing it with them first) since they never got around to planting anything in them.

It's also pretty shady so I don't have high hopes but there's a ton more tomatoes (sun gold cherries and black krim), eggplants, cucumbers, potato, and sweet potato. Then in my beds there's finally some fruits!

Baby tomatoes, sun gold cherries.

In the center of the photo, shaded, a baby cucumber.

And along the right side the clover and wildflowers I seeded have germinated.

There's a piece of metal fencing laid over the smaller seedlings to prevent animals digging. I've already found that the dog loves messing around with my branch/twig mulch, but not so much after rotting leaves are laid over.

The non-edibles

I haven't talked much about the back garden outside of the beds but I've been playing around with few areas. Around the beds there isn't much more than 12" of space along the shorter sides and between the two, so everything gets walked on without having enough sun to get any grass established. I did try growing some crimson clover at the sides but there's not even enough sun at this point for that, so I've ended up using some piles of branches that have been sitting back there for at least a couple of years as mulch, topped with pulled weeds.

In front of the sunnier bed, to the right of the bed is a sedum that blooms in September.

I recently extended the mulch to the right of that bed where there's more space. This is where there's a ton of tulips planted, some of which I dug up and plan to replant a little further away from the bed. I love the tulips but while they're in bloom they come right up to the bed and I can't reach that side of it without stepping all over them. I wish I had a good picture of them in bloom but sadly I never took one.

March 19th

March 29th

April 17th

The final picture gives some idea of how they grow right up to the bed. Below is how it looks now.

Most of the dried tulip leaves and stems have been broken off by either myself or the dog, and sedum has gotten huge, at least 2' in diameter. I'm still hoping to grow some clover and maybe shade tolerant wildflowers back there, but we'll see how the animal traffic and sunlight situation plays out.