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...

Building a better container

This large pot was acquired last winter when someone down the block threw it out, complete with soil and very dead houseplant. I dragged it to my stoop, thought about all the amazing things I could plant in it, like a currant bush, and eventually settled on some cosmos and poppies. Mostly because that's what I had on hand (it's not like currant bushes grow on trees), but also to put off worrying about what might be in the soil.

The poppies were fine, until the lack of water got to them, but the four cosmos only ended up with one flower between them, while growing huge, leafy stalks. They were lovely and green but nothing was getting established at the base, I think because the large plants were hogging all the water, and it was scraggly and ugly down there.

Since I was going to be ripping them out I decided it was time to install a water reservoir while I was at it, since everything out front gets so dry on sunny days. One of my roommates had left a super-skinny liter bottle in the recycling so I poked some holes in the top with an awl and cut off the bottom.

Then stuck it in the newly cleared out and heavily watered pot. Later it was covered with some netting, held in place by a rubber band, to keep it from being a mosquito breeding ground.

The pot got some compost and a few more inches of potting soil, then I headed out back to grab an eggplant. Below you can see one eggplant on the left, but under the huge cucumber leaf there's another, smaller plant.

The poor thing gets so little light and the cucumbers growing like mad next to it doesn't help matters.

It got replanted out front, along with four bush green beans that say they mature in 50 days and enjoy lots of sun. The eggplant is pretty wilted, even after being watered in and I'm not sure it'll hold up to the move. But I'm pretty sure it was never going to set fruit in the back, so even if it doesn't make it I won't be losing much.

There's still room for some more in the pot, but I still haven't decided what exactly. I'll wait to see if the beans germinate.

In other news I thought this cucumber with it's end being held up by the plant was cute. If only all the heavier melons did this automatically.

Self-supported cucumber.

And I actually took a picture of today's harvest!

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.

Front garden update

An overview looking up the steps.

On the steps are strawberries, dill, basil, lemon basil, rue, and some bedraggled marigolds.

Down at the bottom, there are definitely figs happening!

And definitely ground cherries happening.

There's even a little nasturtium flower peeking out under the ground cherry. I'm not sure why this nasturtium is so tragic looking, I figured if it were lacking in sun it'd start inching out over the pot edge but perhaps this is a different type than I've grown before? Anyway so far it's just sat under, growing straight up at a sad rate, while its siblings in my window box have been flowering for the past couple of weeks.

Last weekend I split my rue plant into two pots, one of them is down by the cherries and both are doing well.

Rue.

More tomatoes are ripening, though the Isis don't seem to set nearly as many fruit as the Sun Gold out back. There are also Isis in the back but they've been slower to bloom than the front ones. I suppose in a few weeks or a month I'll know if the sometimes lack of water out front or the size of the container have held these guys back, since by then the back garden plants should have caught up.

Isis Candy Shop cherry tomatoes.

There's also a few eggplant flowers, and I planted some edamame in the pot that used to hold the peas, so I guess those'll be ready in... Octoberish?

Eggplant flowers, a little blurry. The eggplant is the the same pot as the cucumber and seems to be holding its own for now.

Just sprouted edamame, next to the tomatoes.

There's actually edamame that looks ready to harvest in the back, along with a few Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, but the mosquitoes back there make it kind of unfun to visit these days.

Back garden update

Both back beds are nearly all planted!

Shadier bed.

The shadier bed has spinach, kale, and lettuce up at the top. Then the cabbage, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, last seen up close here. At the bottom of the photo are the beans and peas. Unlike out front, the peas back here have barely grown at all, they get the least sunlight of anything here, poor things.

Sunnier bed.

The sunnier bed has some (tiny) herbs up top, followed by ground cherries and cherry tomatos. Closer to the bottom (and with more space in between) are the larger tomatoes, and then along the bottom are eggplant, cucumber, and a lone pepper plant.

Much of both beds are half-assedly mulched with newspaper weighted down with twigs and other garden detritus. Both beds are also caged in with wildlife netting stretched over 1x2s and held taut by nails at each corner, which can be easily unhooked from the nails so the beds are accessible. I'm not sure what happens when the tomatoes get too tall.

For contrast, here's a view of the back from a month ago, when only the shadier bed was planted. This was when the forsythia was in bloom (also the magnolias in other yards), and the trees were mercifully bare.

April 15th.

All of business towards the front of the garden is the landlord's projects. They've put out grass seeds, but that doesn't do so well when it gets really shady back here, which it will.