tomato notes

Started a bunch of paste tomatoes in tiny pots on a heat mat last month. Moved them up to 4" pots tonight. The Amish Paste from Baker Creek seems to be slightly better performing (13/14 vigorous enough to be worth transplanting) than the Sheboygan from Uprising (10/14). The Amish ones are in the colored pots; the Sheboygans are in the black pots.

Next repotting: april?

Springing

I'm just not good at posts with pictures; waiting to get pictures of things means the things don't get posted. So here's a post with a lot of text instead.

 I have two big outdoor goals this year: to no longer need to mow the front slope, and to encourage more pollinators to hang out here. I've been working on both of them in the last few weeks! Saturday of last week was the annual King Conservation District native plant sale. I preordered a few things, and then went down there with H so we could both buy some stuff in the walk-up sale too. Now, looking at the prices on the website, I thought "well, that's a little high but reasonable," and ordered two blue elderberries and one mock orange. Then we got to the sale, and we discovered that I had ordered two bundles etc, and that each bundle was 10 bare-root plants. We promptly strategically divided our lists so we didn't repeat species, and bought bundles of a bunch of other stuff too.

 But then we have the best problem ever: so many plants that need to get in the ground! And it's a beautiful weekend! So for the rest of Saturday we worked in H's tiny back yard, where we moved around clumps of rosemary and oregano to make room for various exciting berries. She also gave me two of her rose bushes, since she's really short of space and I'm not so much, and when I got home I plopped those into the front garden bed beside the driveway, which has had a big blank spot in it ever since the old heating oil tank came out of its underground lair.

Sunday it was my turn.

back on the post horse

This morning on the way to work Skrillex's "Breakin' a Sweat" came on my phone and it was this moment of "yep, that's my life": taking transit to work, knitting, listening to a dubstep riff on Jim Morrison. I don't know. Something about the collision of disparate elements there.

I'm going to try to get back in the habit of posting here, on the theory that doing so will help me stay motivated to keep doing the actual things that get posted about. So here we are in the second half of October: I need to pull out my last tomato plants now that the wet is setting in, and bring in their unripe fruit to ripen in a paper bag. The fig tree is having its second crop after all, which I'd worried wouldn't ripen, so we need to harvest those also and figure out what to do with them. The south-end bed has purple barley and fava beans growing on one side, both of which are thriving, and garlic planted on the other, which is starting to sprout. I botched getting my early seedlings started for winter veggies, but a few of the kale might make it, and maybe I'll cave and buy a packet of starts from somewhere. Fortunately the chard from last winter appears not to have gotten the memo that it's an annual, and after I cut down the flowering stalks this summer the roots started sending up new leafy growth. So we can keep eating that for a while.

The corn-and-beans patch this summer was an absolute bust, and I suspect the culprit was just plain old low-quality dirt; that was a spot that had been lawn previously. Yesterday I dug the top shovelful under, with the plant matter intact, so it can rot under there over the winter (I did spot a couple of nice big earthworms, so at least I have a little help on this front). I'm going to add more actual finished compost and plant it over in a cover crop, probably field peas, for the winter.

I might do the same thing down front where the daylilies kind of got a hold but the pumpkins did nothing of substance; there, also, I'm dealing with recently ex-lawn. Generally I probably need to remember to be less impatient about getting things into the dirt in places that aren't ready -- spend an extra day on soil amendment and avoid wasting a whole season, self.

I did make a small order from Raintree before the winter set in, to get things into the ground and let them establish roots now, so they're ready to get going in the spring. I have a Camellia sinensis, better known as tea, and a King James mulberry, named after the fellow who planted the tree's progenitor in London a few hundred years ago (the original tree died in the Blitz, but enterprising horticulturalists managed to propagate enough shoots to keep its lineage going). #plantnerd

Another day, another chore. Tonight I need to clean out my kombucha operation and see if the poor mother is still in good enough shape to start a fresh batch. Also maybe see about taking samples for a soil test, if the ground isn't soaked (hah).

mid august???

I keep not posting because I mean to take pictures, or I mean to upload pictures, or I forget when I sit down at the computer, or...


It's harvest time now, a bit from the garden (I'm freezing a steady trickle of paste tomatoes in the hopes of having enough for a canning session by the end of the season) and a LOT from trees and bushes. My fig tree's fruit is ripening, and now we're inundated with fist-sized, brown-black fruit; I need to dig up recipes and figure out what I'm making with all of them. Harvest preservation! Whew. There's also been a lot of foraging: I went out with H to gather blackberries, and we got enough for her to start a five-gallon batch of wine and me to make four pints of jam. Then I went out again by myself the next week and snagged another quart of them to add to some wild-fermented mead, which is now almost ready to decant from secondary fermentation. Then last weekend we went over the hill to a nearby abandoned lot, which is apparently the remains of somebody's orchard; there are two apple trees still bearing -- enough for us to gather ten gallons of mostly-windfall fruit to press for cider -- and two tiny plum trees whose fruit is not quite ripe. Pretty sure I spotted a pear, also, but it bore no fruit, possibly due to being the last one left in the area.


In upcoming-harvest news, my tiger eye beans are producing big pods that are starting to turn brown on a few plants. Keeping an eye on those, because it would be super neat to harvest enough beans for some chili this winter. ...I'm probably *not* going to get a corn harvest, because I just planted too late; the plants are healthy but they're small, and at this point in the season they ought to be taller than I am and fluffy with silk. Lessons for next year!


Also I harvested my one little row of garbanzos, which ultimately wound up with about a handful of beans. They're not a productive enough crop for me to give them dedicated space next year, I don't think. BUT: the individual plants take up very little space, are self-supporting, and fix nitrogen. So the new plan is to just tuck them into corners between plantings of other things.

Parts of dealing with the garden are frustrating or disheartening -- trying to figure out an efficient way to manage water supply, discovering blossom end rot on the first Amish paste tomato, watching the little pear struggle with fireblight -- but some of it is just plain cool.

I honestly harvested these earlier than I would have in a perfect world; the heat this past week made the plants at the less-well-watered end of the row just keel right over. But there they are! I apparently forgot to note which variety these were, but they're lovely. Deep purple skins, creamy interiors. I planted a pound and I think I got five or six pounds back. Nowhere near enough for a winter's supply, clearly, but I'm treating this as my training wheels year. And tonight I'll make something with the ones whose skins got scraped in the digging. Maybe the purple green beans, too. Food season!

beans!!!

garbanzos at green-pod stage! I AM SO EXCITED.

whoops

It turns out I can only keep up with about 2/3 of my life at any given time. I have an unpleasant suspicion that this is how adulthood works for everyone. Anyway, this past week I have been keeping up with the writing part, and not so much with the gardenblogging part. So here, have a few instances of photos from the last week!

 My potato plants love life! I am looking forward to the treasure hunt part of the season.

tomatoes!

We seem to be moving into the warm-ish and dry season -- temperatures in the high 70s in the daytime, clear weather, lots of sun. I was out of town for a few days and came back to all sorts of things enjoying the weather: my fruit trees have finished blooming and are thinking about fruit; the tiny blueberry bushes are putting out some blossoms; the strawberries are blossoming and starting to set fruit; the lilies in the kitchen bed are approaching waist-high and budding. And the tomatoes, which have been living inside, are growing like mad.

Monday I was home from my trip but had taken the day off work, planning to use it for recovery time. Only I also scheduled the electrician to come out and do the panel replacement work I'd need before I got the heat pump in, so they had to turn the power off for a considerable fraction of the day. Which means no internet! No video games! Time to go outside and work on things!

I ripped a lot of weeds out of the front garden beds, enough to make them actually look like garden beds instead of mysterious tangles of non-grass foliage. Then I stirred a bit of compost into the cleared spots and planted some feverfew, borage, and bee balm seeds. We'll see how they do! It's not the sunniest spot on the property but actually gets a decent amount of light when the sun isn't directly south (i.e., mornings and late afternoons). I neglected to take any pictures of that bit, but I did take a gratuitous bee photo since there were several cute little fuzzbees hanging around the azaleas while I worked next to them:

Repotted the sturdiest of my tomato starts yesterday!

Here you see some of the valiant little things. The ones started in coir pots seem to be, on average, doing better than the ones in makeshift newspaper pots -- I think I'd put that down to the coir retaining moisture a little better.

Also planted some bergamot (bee balm) at the edge of the shade-garden area. My capable assistant included for a size comparison.

In addition to my own tomatoes, I am now the proud owner of two gallon-potted beauties who were started in February at the nursery; the plants stand a foot tall and are lush with leaves, thick-stemmed and sturdy. I want to be able to make mine do that! I suspect they were using a lot of artificial light to accomplish it, though, since the amount of sun we get in the spring is not remotely conducive to getting tomatoes excited. Early tomatoes vs. lower-energy impact systems: a dilemma.

I'm tired a lot of the time, whether that's the comfortable physical exhaustion of "just raked up and hauled 15 gallons of camellia petals back to the fledgling compost pile" or the less comfortable emotional exhaustion of being lonely and wishing my stuck-in-another-time-zone roommate could come home. But the year keeps moving, and things keep growing, whether I have the energy to properly pay attention or not.

The asparagus is determined to live, and I am rooting for it.

Three of the four pear varieties on the tree are blooming by now; this picture was taken a few days ago when the very first buds were unfolding.

And the central trunk of my pie cherry is blossoming as determinedly as it knows how.

I'll be removing the spent blossoms from all the fruit trees this year, so the plants focus on getting established instead of trying to find the energy for fruit. It feels like there's a metaphor in there somewhere, maybe for coping with depression, maybe for the first year of homeownership, maybe both. Whatever, it's a metaphor with room for cherry blossoms. That makes it a good one.

if you have any spare patience, please send it my way

So Minter's is still there! And likely to be in the Renton location through August, as of talking to them yesterday. After I walked around for a while wearing Earl-the-kitty as a scarf, I found some things that clearly I still needed. Since my existing plantings aren't doing things fast enough. er.

frost :/

Seattle, you can cut that out any minute now.  (Reports vary, but we're probably past our average last frost date.) Frost on the grass this morning when I left for work, and that can't be doing any of my seedlings or recent transplants any good. I'm selecting for hardiness though, right?

Despite some torrential rain on Saturday morning and some visits on Sunday that wound up taking a lot more of the day than I expected, I still got a few things done. The broccoli rabe at the far end of the garden had finally bolted beyond repair:

So I tore out most of it to leave room in the bed for other things (like potatoes!). I'm leaving a few of the hardiest plants to see if I can collect seed from them once their flowering is done. They apparently require insect pollination, so we'll see how well they were served—I haven't seen bees at these flowers in particular, but they're definitely already in the garden.

...That photo also provides an excellent view of the reason I want to put in a filbert hedge along my south fence.

Cleared those out, planted shallots in among the oats that may or may not come up, tucked in some bulbs in beds and corners for things that just flower instead of making food. And then I had the afternoon to myself and nobody stopping me, so I went up to City People again. Where I bought seed potatoes of two varieties, and some sulfur to amend the soil for my little blueberries—those were my actual reasons for going—and then because I shouldn't be allowed in garden stores unsupervised I also bought a huckleberry and a salmonberry, both in gallon pots. Someday it will be possible to eat everything on my property. (Fear me, lawn. Your days are numbered.)