Happy Halloween!!!

What's that got to do with tomatoes? Absolutely Nothing!!! (Does anyone else have music running through their minds, when they write certain things done?) Ah, never mind.

Pumpkins are a pretty easy thing to grow. Especially accidental out-of-the-compost pumpkins. They thrive in a rich, moist soil, which the compost pile provides magnificently! No matter how inconvenient a spot that may be to have pumpkins growing, it is ideal! Which leads me to garden amendments, top dressing, and composting.

I've talked about compost and additions to the garden before, but I'll touch on it again, because this year I have a special offer for any one in the Aylmer/Ottawa area. Free horse manure!!! Now if you find this offer exciting, you are either a freak, or a gardener, or both. Welcome to the club! Please send me an email for further directions. This offer is open to anyone, large or small amounts, and did I mention, free??

One reason I've been so MIA around this blog is that my days are filled; with feeding, turning out, occasionally mucking out, and general horsey stuff. Even riding once in a while. And big animals like horses produce a lot of really great potential compost. I have yet to take advantage of this fact, but I'm planning to this weekend. We have a window of opportunity weather-wise, for a really good clean up outside, which should include top dressing and/or digging in amendments into the beds. With manure, you want to make sure you get the oldest, well-rotted stuff possible, fresh is too strong and will burn the roots. If you're digging it into a veggie bed that is empty, overwintering fresher stuff should be okay. The worms and other little buggies will do the job for you. If you are side dressing shrubs, trees or perennials, the older the better the manure.

You can't get much better than horse manure. Horses are fed purely hay and grain (and the occasional bunch of carrots), unlike what is considered 'food' for cows or pigs. And the use of antibiotics and such is purely medicinal, not an every day ocurrance as it is with many other farm animals. To my mind, other than possibly mushroom compost, this makes it the safest, purest, most 'organic' compost available. Now's the perfect time to dig in!!

It's been forever....

I haven't been posting much lately, for a variety of reasons. It was a really busy summer, I never did get those blossoms bagged, and it was a terrible season production wise. Literally very few plants produced much of anything. I kind of lost hope there, and lost interest in posting much about the disastrous garden. I still managed to save a lot of seeds from the few that I did get, and I'm hoping next year will be better. I have access to all the horse manure a gardener could dream of and will be digging a lot of it in the beds this fall. Hopefully some good soil ammending will help the plants next summer. A late blight hit them, and pretty much ended the season for me. There was very little that could have been done to save them, with the weather that we had. I know I wasn't alone, looking at other gardens and talking to others, we all had a pretty crappy growing season.
What can you do? Make plans for next year!

Quick July Update

A happy little bee, and one of the reasons why I needed to bag the flowers (and didn't!) As I watched this little bee, he visited more than ten different tomato plants. Cross pollination at work! I keep telling myself there is still time to bag them, but I'm starting to think I am lying to myself!

Peaches n Cream :
variegated brugs tend to grow at a slower rate.
This one has been proving that for the last three years!

Cherokee Purple

Black Plum

Surprise Potato Patch

Frosty Pink:
Won't be much longer!

The garden and the plants are running amock. This would include the weeds, that I really should be out pulling right now, but have been putting off this post for much too long! We have had so much rain in my area for the last four weeks. And enough sun, when it comes out, that it balances out nicely, and everything seems to have double in size in the last week while I was away!
There are many little tomatoes forming on the plants, the brugs are loading up with flower buds, and I've even found a surprise potato patch in the brug bed. I got confirmation from some other gardeners, that potatoes can indeed overwinter in my zone, given the right conditions. So some little taters that were not found last fall have sprouted up into a very healthy vigorous looking potato patch.

If it ever stops raining...

I will get out there and bag some of the blossoms, taking some pictures to illustrate what I plan to do. But so far, it has rained every day for the last two weeks or so. The plants are loving it, and are growing at an incredible rate. It is enough to keep things lush and green, without drowning everything. The sun comes out for a couple hours everyday, just to remind us that it's there. Very English weather. Almost all the tomato plants have flower buds if not flowers, so it's looking good in the department.

I have found homes for a few more plants, but still have extras, if anyone is still looking for plants! Brandywines are all gone, but I still have some of the ones I mentioned in a previous post. And a couple of extra Black Cherry or Black Krim, or Carbon, or Palmira's Italian Heirloom. You know you wanna!! Give in to the temptation. You know who you are!!!

Save a Tomato Plant

Gold Medal:
large to 1 1/2lb, beefsteak tomato,
orangey-yellow, blushing with red,
superb sweet and mild flavor,
very low acid, 80 days

Omar's Lebanese:
Huge, pink beefsteak, up to 3 -4 lbs,
one of the largest tomatoes you can grow,
good disease tolerance, good yeilds,
sweet old tomato flavor,
a rare Lebanese Heirloom, 80 days

Hillbilly (RL and PL - I have both)
aka Flame
Large bi-color beefsteak, yellow/red marbled
1 -2 lbs, large yeilds,
Heirloom believed to be from West Virginia, 85 days

Okay, here's the deal:

I still have tomato plants, nice, fairly large plants, that will produce amazing tomatoes! Most are still in 4 inch pots, some are in larger than 4 inch pots. They are organic, very healthy, and promise to behave in your garden, giving you out of this world tasting tomatoes, and a rainbow of colors, as long as you treat them right! There are about 50 of these, that I cannot pitch. If they must, they will stay in these pots, producing what they will, for the rest of the summer. If you would like to adopt a few plants, with the promise that you will give me an update at the end of the summer, please contact me. The adoption fee will be waived at this point!

I can leave the plants out front for easy pick up, for anyone who wants. I also still have a few Carbon, Brandywine, and others to choose from! Please find it in your heart to give one of these lovely little plants a home!

Time for bagging blossoms

If you plan to save seeds from your OP tomato plants, and want pure seeds with little chance of crosses, it's time to watch your plants carefully. They should be setting flowers or close to it. You want to bag them before they open to prevent any pollinating insects from reaching them. Potato leaf plants are more susceptible to cross pollination than regular leaf plants, but the insects are certainly active in my yard right now. It's open season on all my plants!



The flowers on the Black Pear are already open, so it's too late to bag them. I'll have to catch the next batch of flowers.




These buds are almost ready to be bagged. This year I will try to ensure that everything I save seed from is bagged, so that everything is guaranteed pure - for myself and for trades or give aways.

Full view of one of the raised beds, with the plants in all their glory. I always find it interesting how the rate of growth can vary so much, even between the same variety. I have one Prudens Purple that is more than double the size of another. They all received the same compost and epsom salt in the planting hole, so it's pretty much strictly genetics of those particular plants.

This is the patch of Swiss Chard that provided us with our first salad greens. We also threw in some chives and green onions, and spinach and lettuce from the grid garden.
And yes, those are some poor little orphan tomato plants, who have not made it out of the starter trays. I don't know that they will either. I still have probably over two hundred plants, either in 4inch pots, or in starter cells. I don't have room for many more in the garden, and I don't want to grow more than 20 or so in large gallon pots, so I guess some of these babies are going to be compost soon. It sounds silly, but I hate to do that. It feels criminal to compost these little plants that I've grown from seed.

Galina's Yellow....uhm, not

This is the tomato plant that I have been growing since just before Christmas. It has quite a few clusters of tomatoes, and they are quite tasty, according to my tomato tester. It was supposed to be a Galina's Yellow, but the seeds must have gotten crossed last year. I didn't bag any of the tomato blossoms that I saved seed from for myself, so it's not really surprising that there are a few crosses in my seeds. I'm not sure what this cross could be, but the result is a nice, small orange tomato, that is slightly sweet, juicy, but not too seedy. I've planted seeds from the first tomato, to grow it out again and see what I get. Why not!





Two tomato plants have disappeared from my raised beds. These were not small plants, between 8 - 12 inches high. One was a Rhoades Heirloom, the other was an Abricot. Hmm, I'm not impressed. I suspect rabbits, raccoons, or possibly skunks. Or a naughty squirrel. They actually took the plant right at soil level. It looks like it was just snipped off. The tag is still there, and the root system is there, but there is no sign of the rest of the plant. I don't think it is cutworms, they would not eat the entire plant? I may have to cover them up at night with the plastic sheets again, just to protect the plants, which I hate to have to do at this point, cause I'll have to get up early to remove them so it doesn't get too hot in there in the mornings. But just in case it is cutworms, I'm planting large coffee sticks beside every stem, to thwart them. Cutworms must be able to encircle the entire stem in order to do their damage, so collars are sometimes used, or some other type of barrier, to prevent the damage. Who knows, it very well could be cutworms. The MO is the same.