Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Fresh Produce in T-minus How Many Days?

I am continually amazed in the garden.  What on May 7th, not even a full month ago looked like this...
Now looks like this...
Wow!  Really coming along.  I think I will be able to harvest some veggies in a week or so.  I have some baby yellow squash...
and some baby small cucumbers (these are going to be used for pickles-once I learn how to make them!)
Of course not everything is doing amazingly well.   I'm having some tomato problems this year.  A couple weeks back they started developing these black spots and the lower leaves started turning yellow.
It appears to be some kind of fungus/blight.  I talked to the extension service as well as another gardening website guru and they mentioned that due to all of the flooding last fall here in the metro area that quite a few people are having this problem.  They recommended I remove all of the infected leaves and put them in a garbage bag in the trash (not throw them into the woods) and then spray the rest of the plant with Daconil (a fungicide.)  Sorry to all you organic folks but I did what they recommended rather than re-plant 10 tomatoes.  It seems to have helped some, but in all honesty I think that my tomato crop may be small and short this year.  The plants are very stalky, not full like normal. 
Ironically the poor dying tomatoes offer my first glimpse of fresh veggies...
These are yellow cherry tomatoes and I think I shall put them on my salad tonight!  (As an aside-I actually HATE tomatoes.  Really.  They just freak me out.  BUT-I'm trying very hard to learn to like them.  I planted quite a few varieties in the hopes that I would find one I prefer.)
Finally to close this week's gardening update I thought I would share my new watering method.  I have tried many different sprinklers and have tried putting it on a ladder (which is a real pain) when the green beans/okra get too tall.  Yesterday we installed these poles into the ground, two of them since I have such horrible water pressure.  I added a "stake" type sprinkler to the top and now all I need to do to water is turn it on and then relocate the sprinkler part one time to get full coverage.
The posts are 4' and 6' (mostly because I had to buy a 10' section of pipe.)  This should save me from getting so muddy on work mornings.

By next week I might have pictures of my first "harvest"!  I leave you with the following completely unrelated photo of last weekend's sushi night-it was just too pretty not to post!

1 comment:

  1. I hate tomatoes also! Bleh! I only like them when they're chopped up really small like in salsas.

    Oh, and my husband, if he read blogs, would love your garden info. He wants to start one some day.

    And, he LOVES sushi. I commend you for braving such crazy food dishes.

    I'm a bland/boring eater myself and cooking is not my strong suit...neither is gardening.

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