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.

Bits and bobs

These days, round three of the beans are coming along nicely.

Provider bush beans to the right, nearly 2 weeks after planting.

Edamame flowering, planted back in July.

I'm hoping for more and bigger soybeans from this batch, since they'll get direct sun. The ones in the back garden have so little sun they don't even reach upwards, instead they just snake around on the ground, lost.

Two more eggplants will be ready soon, maybe even around the same time.

It's cooled down enough these days I might consider a baked dish, especially if I get one or two more from my CSA.

Here's how the front looks this morning, which mostly differs from last week in that I've moved some plants around. And also a new zinnia bloomed.

Next year the front needs more flowers, definitely.

In the back I managed a better picture of my thick and thin cucumbers a couple of days ago.

Poking around online led to the usual suspects: uneven watering, lack of nutrition, or too much nitrogen. But another possible culprit is uneven pollination of the flowers, which I'd had no idea about. My money is on water though, since I rarely water out back. It's been a wet enough summer that I can get away with it, and watering means standing still for more than 5 seconds which leads to more complete mosquito bite coverage.

Otherwise the back keeps churning out cherry tomatoes, below pictured with the roommate's cat.

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.

First, the bad news

The transplanted eggplant isn't exactly flourishing.

Two days in.

It's not totally dead either, but I'm not sure what I can do for it. If anything the pot it's in has too much water, so I'll just wait and see some more, again.

Then there's the figs, which haven't grown at all since the first couple of weeks they came in.

I wasn't expecting them to get huge, it is a tiny plant in a tiny pot after all, but I worry they don't get enough water/nutrients/whatevs and I'll be looking at tiny green figs in October, wondering where it all went so wrong.

Finally the cucumber that had one end cutely supported by the plant is growing all funny, even though I clipped it free the day after I took the picture, just to avoid this scenario.

It's not a huge tragedy or anything, but these variable thickness cucumbers I seem so adept at growing are harder to pack into jars for pickling. Maybe I'll just end up with a lot of slices for sandwiches.

The good news is I can console myself with at least a few berries or cherry tomatoes every day.

This morning, from the front garden.

Friday, from the back garden.

Thursday, from the front garden.

And my first eggplant is almost big enough to harvest, any day now...

An eggplant!

First eggplant developing! Also more cukes.

Things are coming along out front, with the first eggplant already 3" long. Last week it was still a flower! I moved the cucumber and eggplant pot as far away from the tomatoes as possible on Friday, but yesterday the cucumbers were still finding inappropriate things to wrap around.

That sage isn't going to help you get anywhere, buddy.

There's a newer crop of strawberries coming in, I wonder if they'll taste any different from June's berries.

I had no idea there were so many until I went to take a picture.

I worry a little as I've run out of fish fertilizer and the hardware store has none in stock, while the closest nursery has never had it. Maybe it's time to try out some of that (expensive) bat guano fertilizer they carry?

There was also a honey (and/or mason?) bee out front yesterday, which was exciting since I never see this kind in the front, only in the back. Out front it's usually tiny bees only.

What I think of as a "regular" bee.

The herbs are doing alright, I'm starting to move some to the back since the direct sun plus the heat wave can be rough on the plants. July and August in NYC isn't for the faint-hearted. The one nasturtium out front bloomed and was a lovely peach color, but the plant has since gone back to looking like I singe it with a flamethrower every few days, just for funsies.

Last Monday. 

I've always thought of nasturtiums as fool-proof, probably because they were some of the first flowers I grew, but haven't had much luck this year. In the back the leaves look healthy, but are leggy and never flower, while out front they dry out. I do have two in a window box upstairs that have bloomed prolifically, but the leaves are in a terrible state from the heat and sun.

Eventually I'll find the spot for them—there are probably about ten other microclimates around the building I haven't tried yet.

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.

Early this morning

The cucumber doing what it does best, trying to take over the world.

These might be the start of some figs?!

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.