Beware "Matt or Mike's Wild Cherry" tomato and what I learned about leeks

THE SPRING/SUMMER 2011 GARDEN REPORT

I grew 5 different types of heirloom tomatoes this year - Cherokee Purple - which I really loved - it was the largest type of tomato I have ever grown and was everything it was promised to be.  Large, sweet and meaty.  I wish it had produced more than I got.
Costoluto Gero - in terms of flavor this was my least favorite variety - it was acidic in flavor, prolific during the spring and always seemed to be the one I found when I was looking for tomatoes to pick.  I've discovered I do not care for acidic tomatoes and I was glad when it stopped producing and didn't come back in the fall.   It was a little larger than best pack size.
Eva Purple Ball - this was a nice tomato, I enjoyed it when I could find it but I think it was overwhelmed by its neighbors.
Black Plum - this was a prolific producer, with a smaller fruit that the standard Italian Plum tomato plant you buy in the Lowes or Home Depot garden centers.  I don't know that I will get it again.
Mike's or Matt's Wild Cherry - the optimal word for this plant is "WILD".  OMGosh!  This plant was CRAZY!! It was a pretty tame looking 6" plant for a month and then all of a sudden, it took off!  It became a monster in my garden bed, sending out branches in all directions. I found it growning everywhere.  All of the other tomato plants had to compete with it for space.  I was picking "Wild" Cherry tomatoes in and through every other plant in the garden.  What was worse is that unlike, a plump, sweet, 1-inch "Sweet 100" the tomatoes on this plant were about the size of the end of your little pinky finger.  When you popped it in your mouth you had the sensation of eating mostly tomato skin and  little else.  I will NEVER grow this one, again and I will warn everyone to do the same.

TRYING TO FOIL THE BIRDS

I decided if I were going to protect my tomatoes from the birds, I would need to build some protection.  I took PVC pipe to create a frame work than I  attach deer netting.  Unlike bird netting which is 14' by 14', deer netting is 7' wide and 100' long.  I was not content with just wrapping it around the sides of the frame work, I decided to run netting across the top as well.  This worked well until the Mike's Wild Cherry grew through the roof.  I couldn't reach most of those tomatoes so I let the birds have them.  This picture doesn't show the tomatoes through the roof but try to imagine tomato vines growing 3 or so feet into the air above the roof line all the way across the top of the tomato house and every single vine came from Mike's Wild Cherry.

OTHER THINGS LEARNED  SPRING AND SUMMER 2011

I learned that leeks are a cool season crop and when the tomatoes took over and the weather became unbearable the leeks simply disappeared.  I had placed the cucumbers - a bush variety - about 3 feet in front of the tomatoes but found that this was not a wise decision.  Although I was training them up, they were inside the tomato house and therefore often obscured by the netting and Mike's Wild Cherry.  I can't begin to count the number of cucumbers I didn't find until they became large yellow balloons with large seeds and a bitter flavor.

I found that the tomato house was great for tomatoes but lousy for plants that needed pollenators in order to produce fruit.  Next year, I will make the structure smaller so that it only encloses the tomatoes and not everything else.  Eggplant and peppers did poorly.  Basil got lost in the tomato vines but managed to reseed itself.  I put in bush beans in another section of the middle garden but once again the squirrels and birds plucked out the seeds as they broke through the ground.  Instead of 36 plants I got 5.  I was able to pick a few summer squash before the southern squash vine borer found it and destroyed the plant.

We worked all summer long, watering the tomatoes during the long drought we are experiencing in this part of the country, in hopes of having a great fall crop.  In September, I noticed the leaves on the tomato plants looked misshapened, which seemed odd.  As I looked closer, I discovered that every tomato plant was infested with mealy bugs.  The simple solution was to spray everything with Safer Insecticidal soap or make a homemade solution, except with the vines up through the roof it was inpossible to reach and clear the problem, so I decided to tear the whole thing down.  Better luck next year.

This year's grand experiement was successful in some ways but not so much in others.

Preparing for Green Beans

Well, the broccoli has now all gone to seed and the temperatures are moving upward.  I pulled out all the broccoli plants, yesterday.  I'll be putting bush green beans into their place.  I'll need to get some chicken wire in order to create a protective barrier that will keep the squirrels out of the bean bed as the beans begin to break ground.  The little critters find the freshly sprouted bean seeds quite tasty.  I'm not interested in sharing.

Heirloom Tomatoes

I'm excited about my tomatoes this year.  Instead of buying the standard hybrids available at the local garden center attached to Lowes or Home Depot, I decided to go to my local neighborhood grower, Enchanted Forest. They debuted their heirlooms this past Saturday.  Here is what I got

Cherokee Purple - medium large dusky rose fruits with full flavor
Black Plum - oval 2" fruits, from deep mahogany to black-brown, nice rich color makes great sauce
Eva Purple Ball - smooth round 4 - 5 oz fruit, blemish free, very good flavor, does well in humid areas

I like the names of these as much as the descriptions - I am especially interested in the Eva Purple ball because it does well in humid areas.

Several weeks earlier I found a second heirloom tomato, that I was told would do well in the heat and humidity of SE Texas.  The farmer lives north of me by 2 hours and he grew the Costoluto Gero last year up until August, then he cut it back and it grew back when temperatures got cooler in the fall.   I have no clue what it will taste like or what it will look like but I'm excited to try it and find out.  I'll keep you posted as the season progresses.

Broccoli is AMAZING!!!

Back in the fall of 2010 I planted broccoli for the first time.  I was curious to see how it would grow.  One of the first things I noticed was that because the weather was too cool for insects to thrive, I had no problem with cabbage moths or cabbage worms.  That was a plus.  We began harvesting 7 - 8 inch wide heads through the month of January.  I didn't pull my plants up after this initial harvest, as I had read that if left alone broccoli would put out shoots which would grow into additional smaller heads.

Here is what my broccoli looks like now!  I have lots of new heads forming.   This picture was taken AFTER I picked quite a number heads for supper tonight.

My cabbage looks to be ready to pick.  It too has been left alone by the cabbage moth and cabbage worm.

I must report that the broccoli and cabbage plants were placed in the garden bed that I experimented with last spring.  Instead of trying to plant in the gumbo that was in this grow box I decided to follow the principles outlined in the book Lasagna Gardening  by Patricia Lanza.  I placed a 3 - 5 sheet layer of newspapers down first (I didn't even bother weeding or double digging the bed), then a layer of cut grass, then a layer of peat moss, then a layer of leaves, layer of peat moss.  I repeated the layering twice  cause by then the squash vines from the other bed were spreading over this bed. The contents of this grow box is friable, loose, nutrient rich (as you can see by the color of the plants), crumbly and holds moisture well.  I'm impressed.  Lazy gardener that I am this method is quite successful.

More Things Discovered

Who Knew Peppers Would Survive the Blazing Summer Sun?

I had a most pleasant surprise when I cleared the morning glory vines off the spring garden in September. There, still struggling to put out fruit, were the two green pepper plants I had put in April. I found three peppers that were beginning to turn red (and now you know why red peppers cost so much in the grocery stores - they are actually green peppers that have been left on the vine to ripen - it takes longer), which I picked. Now that they no longer have to compete for sun and water they are continuing to produce, there are at least 5 - 6 peppers at various stages of growth. Some look like they are even ready to pick.

Gifts from Hurricane Ike -          The next two pictures were brought to me thanks to hurricane Ike.

 These sunflowers now grow in profusion in the cracks in the concrete between the garage and the neighbors fence.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This WAS a Chinese Elm tree. They produce an inordinate amount of seeds every fall and can really be described as a weed tree.  There are baby Chinese Elm trees in a great many places they do not need to be around our property.
 

I can still remember asking my DH to remove that little tree in the corner of the garden before it got too big.  Well, it was about 10 - 12 inches across when Ike came blowing through and he broke off a number of branches, it being a soft wood.  A friend offered to cut it down for us and we took him up on the offer.  Since Ike, the stump has been busily trying to send out tiny, thin branches all around its edge, that is until I tried something.  A friend of mine shared with me a technique she uses to remove old stumps from her property.  She piles a mound of lit charcoal briquettes onto the offending stump and just keeps lit coals on the stump until eventually the stump is just burned away.  I'm quite good at putting the lit charcoal on the stump but I am not so good at remembering to keep adding new charcoal.  The first time I did this to the stump however, I did manage to kill it and now it has stopped sending out thin little branches.  I've even noticed that the bark has fallen off.  I think I'll try burning the stump one more time and then if I haven't cleared it completely, I'll let the termites finish the job.

 

The Fall Garden 2010

The weather here in South East Texas is beautiful. My tomatoes have been planted for a few weeks now but is wasn't until last week that I started to grow them vertically. My vertical support system took a beating this summer with the weight of the morning glory vines so I had to do some hunting around to find fittings and poles that were still straight and undamaged to create somthing for this fall. I love the nylon netting they have a Home Depot, the squares a wide enough apart that I can weave the tomato vines in and out of them without difficulty and without using twisty ties. This is what is looks like.

In front of the tomatoes are 9 broccoli plants and 18 butter crunch lettuce plants. The white strips are old window blind strips. They say if you don't have a square foot garden marked in square foot blocks it's not a square foot garden. The fall garden is in my second grow box, behind it is the spring grow box.

Gardening - Spring 2010

This year I tried something a little different.

I started "Lasagna" composting, i.e. linear composting is what it's been called for a long time. Every time I had plant matter that could be added to the garden, be it grass clippings, rabbit litter, or kitchen vegetable waste, I added it. Sometime in March I noticed some type of squash growing in a great clump a one end of the grown bed I was actively adding material to. In fact, I had two different types of vines pop up out of the grown box. I weeded most of the huge clump out and left probably 3 - 4 plants to continue growing. It was fascinating to watch and I was excited to know what I had tossed in that had volunteered.

Since one end of the bed was actively growing something vine-like I decided to plant the opposite end of the box with tomatoes, green pepper, Japanese eggplant and bush cucumbers. This was at the beginning of April. Note to self: If you want tomatoes before it gets too hot, they must be either short season varieties or they must go in no later than the beginning of March. I tried growing several 'heirloom' varieties but my most successful was one from Mexico called Tlacolula - It's shaped somewhat like a plum tomato but it had deep ridges all the way around it. It was a very mild tomato in flavor, it didn't have the sharp, acidic taste of so many tomatoes you get these days. I really enjoyed and have (I hope successfully)saved some seeds.

I wish now that I had taken a picture of my thriving garden. I haven't grown so successful a garden since I lived in New Jersey, more than 15 years ago. I think it had a lot to do with the composed organic material.

I discovered I had volunteer spaghetti squash and volunteer acorn squash coming up at one end of the garden bed. Every day when I came out to check the garden it seemed like the vines had grown another foot or more. I had 12 spaghetti squashes of various sizes hanging from the nylon netting I had stretched across my galvanized tubing frames and 1 acorn squash. I was excited. Then it happened...

The squash vine borer moth found my garden and my lovely vines. In two weeks my vines were history. I tried to cut the grubs out of the vines in an attempt to save the plants and for a short time that worked but quickly the moth laid more eggs, and as they say, the rest is history. The first to go was the acorn squash vines (I harvested 1 acorn squash), the next was zucchini (it was almost like it was here today - gone tomorrow) (I harvested just one zucchini squash), then the spaghetti squash vines were attacked(I had to pick my immature squash and hope that they'd ripen on the counter.) It was very sad. I'm still seeking an organic way to deal with them next year. The Master Gardeners at the AgriExtension office have all said "Good Luck with that, there isn't anything." The moth has a fat red body with black wings.

I fought the birds and won most of my Tlacolula tomatoes. Bird netting helped with that. Near the end of the tomatoes productive season the leaf footed stink bugs arrived with their nymphs. Now I know what the white dots on tomatoes and peppers are - they are the damaged done by the stink bugs. I discovered that a dust buster is an excellent way to deal with them, since they prefer to crawl rather than fly. I'll be using a dust buster more frequently in the garden next spring.

Currently, the only thing growing happily in the garden is morning glory. I pulled out everyone I saw before it got too hot to work in the garden. The minute I turned my back it spread like wild fire.