tomatoes - good news and bad news

soon-to-be-ripe cherokee purple tomato

The tomatoes have been ripening quickly. The first cherry tomatoes only took about two days to go from pale green to red!

BUT - I had trouble with blossom end rot and sun scald. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on - I did see a few insects on the plants, and I blamed them at first. But after cutting into every bad tomato that I picked, doing lots of googling, and talking to some farmers, I think it was just that the blossom end rot and sun scald created opportunities for insects. I also put yellow sticky paper up around the tomato bed. I would recommend this because it showed me which flying insects were hanging around my tomatoes. Turns out there wasn't anything damaging in large numbers, just some flies.

small spot of blossom end rot (seriously, in bad cases it basically covered the whole tomato)

what the blossom end rot looks like on the inside. In every case, it went much deeper than it
looked like it would on the outside.

First - blossom end rot. It is caused by calcium deficiency in the soil but also by watering at night. This is the third year I've grown tomatoes and I have always watered them at night and never had this problem. But now I know. I tried eating the parts that didn't look damaged by blossom end rot, but they are not tasty.

two tomatoes with blossom end rot - the one on the left was picked early, before the rot spread
and before insects took advantage. The one on the right was picked late,
after the rot spread and insects binged on it.

Second - sun scald. I think this was caused by the long stretch of very hot weather we got. These were just small spots and if I brought the tomatoes right when they began to ripen, bugs didn't get to them. So I was able to just cut off the sun scald and eat the tomato anyway.

tomato with two spots of sunscald

Two things for next year: I am going to plant repelling flowers like marigolds and borage around the tomatoes. I may not have insect trouble with tomatoes this year, but as I've said before, I'm going to be much more proactive next year. Second, I thought with 20 tomato plants designated for canning, I would have an easier time getting large amounts of fruit ripened at once. So far I am getting a handful of tomatoes every day. In addition, I began examining the canning books to see how many tomatoes you need for a pint of tomato sauce. It is a lot! I think it was 10 pounds per pint. So, I will actually at least double my tomato plants next year, or plan my garden for summer eating and buy a ton of tomatoes direct from a farmer.

I must say I was very relieved when I determined that the tomato problems were not caused by insects. I am upset about losing the squash, but I would be DEVASTATED if I didn't get the tomato crop I wanted. For the last couple of weeks I have been able to bring in lots of perfect tomatoes so I'm feeling hopeful!

unsuccessful vegetable update

Three crops have been disappointing - carrots, onions, and broccoli.

The carrots seemed to have a high germination rate, but very few grew to be seedlings - maybe 10 instead of the 200 or so I was expecting. The ones that made it past seedling stage seemed to do well, but I harvested a couple of them and they tasted really bad. I think the problem was the soil - I did an unsupported raised bed and through some combination of wind and rain, the bed spread out until it was only a few inches off the ground. This exposed the top of the root.

The onions also seemed to have a high germination rate, but even fewer grew to be seedlings and none of them grew past that stage.

I planted two types of broccoli, with mixed results. The arcadia didn't germinate well (40%) but those that germinated grew well. The Thompson germinated well (100%) but only two survived past the seedling stage. The problem here seems to be more about timing - we had such a long spring that by the time the soil was warm enough for broccoli germination, it quickly got too hot for broccoli to flower. My plants are still growing strong, just not producing anything edible. See, they are huge!

Arcadia broccoli plant

I thought I would be able to do a second planting of all three crops for fall harvest, but after doing a bit more research about the soil needs of carrots, onions, and broccoli it turns out that is not the case for onions. Theoretically you could, because they take about four months to mature, but they don't germinate well in hot temperatures and they don't dry well in cold temperatures. Oh well, I will try again next year. Carrots and broccoli take a little more than two months to mature, so I will plant them soon. I'm planting carrots in the potato bed and broccoli in the old carrot bed, since the broccoli did reasonably well in that shady spot. My spouse tilled the potato bed so that it would be nice and soft for carrots - now I just need to fertilize the soil and stick the seeds in the ground!

birds as insect management

I know that experts on integrated pest managment will probably think this is way too obvious - but I had an epiphany the other day when touring a neighbor's garden. I pointed out hundreds of squash bug eggs and babies on her squash plants, and she wasn't concerned. She said that they always have them but they don't cause any problems. I wondered how this could be, and she said "the birds eat them!" At that moment I paused to listen to my environment and I heard the chattering of several birds, dozens probably, in her gorgeous tree-shaded yard. I noticed the bird bath and the bird houses scattered around. Returning to my garden, I heard.......nothing. For some reasons I don't have any birds in my yard!

Now I want to get birds into my garden, pronto! We do have one tree nearby but we will have to add a few nice homes (different types to attract different birds), places for the birds to rest in the actual garden, and a place or two that will provide them water. We are going to work on that this weekend, and I want to pick up a few bat houses while we're at it.

Of course, then I might have a problem with birds eating my garden, but I guess like everything else I will worry about that later.

pests

We're getting ready to go out of town for several days, so we've been focusing on getting the garden in tip top shape. We have caretakers lined up, but we don't want to ask too much of them. I've spent hours ruthlessly going after weeds this week, which has given me some time to reflect on this gardening season.

I know I've said it before, but I cannot emphasize enough how much time I have spent working on protecting my plants from bugs. Not bugs in general, but specific pests that are especially damaging and with high populations. These include japanese beetles, squash bugs, squash vine borers, and now cucumber beetles (though I've really only seen a few of the latter). I don't completely mind this work, but I would really like to avoid it in the future.

I have spent far more time working on the squash bug eggs and japanese beetles than I have on weeding. I don't mean this to discourage people from gardening - the opposite, actually. I believe a proactive stance towards certain insects is best. Usually that means spraying harmful chemicals, but when you're not willing to do that, prevention is much better than treatment. Especially as these problems are rampant in the area I live - one family told us that they lose their squash every year and they never knew why. After hearing us talk about vine borers, they realize that is what's going on. They were blaming themselves. Since you are almost guaranteed to have these unwelcome visitors try to take up residence, stopping them before they do damage makes the most sense.

I will say I have given up on the squash bug eggs. It just took too much time and after the vine borers, it seems highly unlikely that we will ever get anything to eat from these plants. I do still go out and capture the squash bugs - they still come out of hiding when the plant is sprayed, and they have started to live under the boards we laid out. They are pretty easy to get rid of once you see them. There have been dozens under one of the board every time I pick it up. I don't think the bugs grow fast enough to be ones that hatched from eggs on the plant, they must be coming from somewhere else. According to my research, it takes about a week for eggs to hatch, and then about a month for bugs to grow to be adults. Unless a bunch hatched before I ever noticed the eggs.

We have made the decision to pull up the last galeux d'eyesines plant. It was continuing to grow new vines and form new blossoms, but the plant overall looked really ill. If we were going to be here it might have been a more difficult decision, but we also have to worry about our watermelon plants. I pulled it and have left it on the squash bed as a trap for a couple of days - I'm hoping it continues to attract all of the bugs so I can kill them.

The zucchini is looking okay, but not great. I don't know if we will get any more zucchinis from it before it dies.

We're going to dust the watermelons with diatamaceous earth and wrap the stems in aluminum foil before we leave. I also gave the squash trellis to the watermelon - hopefully being off the ground will help, somehow.

(8/9)

squash update and new trellis

Although I said I was giving up on the squash, you knew I wouldn't be able to totally do it. I'm not inspecting the leaves the way I was, but I did decide that if the plants were trellised, it would be easier to find and remove bug eggs. My spouse and I together designed this tent-style trellis that will be easy to store and easy to put up next year. The squash plant seems to love it - though I did have to uproot some of the areas where it attached, it has grown quite a bit since we put the trellis up.

This is the trellis, modeled by two watermelon plants.

I'm considering trying to grow squash again - just once more. If I do, I will be extremely proactive about insects and I won't add any new vegetables, so I can focus my attention and energy on successfully growing squash. I know now the importance of checking your garden every day - I would train the squash (so it didn't grow through the neighbor's fence), inspect it, put out insect traps, etc.

However, the squash plant that had the large fruit set on it is officially dead. It was looking pretty bad near the root, but one of the vines still looked strong, so I put extra dirt around its root and gave it some water in hopes that it would become the new root. Each day it looked worse and today, the large fruit had fallen off. It's been 10 days since we performed squash surgery, so I don't know if the plant died because of the surgery or because we didn't find all of the borers. The other plant that we found about a dozen small borers in looks really good - for now - though it doesn't have any fruit set.

The zucchini is still growing strong and we've harvested several. A summer squash that I planted later is growing slowly - maybe it is working on its roots or maybe it doesn't like the heat wave we've had.

(7/28)

squash surgery

We tried the surgery to salvage the squash last night. I don't really care about the zucchini plant but I will be sad to lose the galeux d'eyesines squash. I'm excited to try them, and I was really hoping to be able to give a few to friends and family. They travel better than tomatoes or spinach. So we're going to do what we can.

leaves wilting like this is one of the signs of squash vine borer larvae in your plant.

Galeux d'eyesines squash with evidence of squash vine borer larvae damage near the root - see the orange sawdust-like substance? That shouldn't be there.

zucchini with same stuff

We went outside with a small knife, the bucket of water, toothpicks, and gloves. My spouse used the knife to cut vertically above the holes where we could see the orange strawdust-like substance that squash borers produce.

The plant felt pretty strong - it was actually difficult to cut into, which is good news (less damage so far). But, we couldn't find any caterpillars (squash borers at larvae stage). We moved on to the zucchini - same thing.


When he cut into the last plant, the second winter squash, we found about a dozen teeny-tiny caterpillars. I really couldn't even see them from where I was standing - they were about the size of a short grain of rice. We also found one large one, about an inch long. He would scrape them out, then drop them in the bucket of soapy water. The toothpicks came in handy here, since they were so small it was hard to get them with the knife. After he had scraped everything rotten out of the plant, we declared the surgery over and I put a shovelful of rich dirt on top of the wound. This makes the plant more likely to live through the harrowing experience.

photo of an out-of-focus small borer larvae on a toothpick.

Now that we'd seen them, we went back to the other two and tried again. We still couldn't find any on the zucchini but we found a few on the other winter squash plant. They made it through the night without collapsing, but I expect it will take a few days to know if they really lived through the surgery. And of course we have no idea if we got all of the borers or not. I was noticing a few other places I thought we should check, so we might be performing surgery again tonight...

Update: the plants all lived through the surgery, but we didn't get all the borers. I think the problem was that the plants were so big by the time we did the surgery, and the roots were so stocky and thick that we just missed them with our cut. It's also possible that new eggs hatched. Twelve days later the second plant died, which was the one with the big fruit on it. I do not expect the third plant to live because it had serious damage and I had to remove the main root. The photos below show the borers and the shredded roots a little better. But, it's still there two days after these photos were taken and the plant is still alive, so maybe there is reason to hope.




If I plant squash again, I will use an aggressive strategy to prevent the borers. They seem like a more serious problem to me because they completely killed two of our plants before we got any produce from them. At least with the squash bugs there's a better chance that you will get to collect a little on all of your hard work. I will use trellising, wrap the base of the plant in foil, put out yellow pans filled with water, sprinkle diatamaceous earth, and spray neem oil. At this point I am not sold on row covers - they seem like more trouble than they're worth because they also keep out pollinators. I haven't heard good things about them from the forums I've read.

I might wait a few years before trying squash again in hopes of discouraging the borers from hanging around my garden - but then again, there was no garden in this spot for several years so I'm not sure this will help. The only reason I'm still considering this is that I'm certain the yard was sprayed using artificial chemicals, probably excessive amounts in last two years. I think it's possible that in the process of transitioning this space of land from conventional to organic, I've been hit hard with insects that were being suppressed unnaturally and unsustainably prior to us. I don't actually know if this is how it works but it seems plausible.

squash update - it's not good

I had a post written over the weekend about how well my squash was doing. It was growing so fast!

zucchini

It looked beautiful!

galeux d'eyesines winter squash

I already had fruit set!

(can you see the baby winter squash hanging on the vine?)

But things change quickly.
First, I saw a couple of clusters of small reddish-orange balls on a couple of my winter squash leaves.


I didn't know what they were and I found them right before I went to Saturday market, so I took a couple of photos and asked the MGs and my farmer about them. They were squash bug eggs, probably one of the most common problems affecting squash. They can really devastate a crop, so I knew I would need to go home and remove them. I tried scraping them off with my gloved hand, but they are too small and sticky. I then tried using a paper towel soaked in soapy water, but what worked best was just scraping them off with my fingernail. Honestly, it grosses me out to think that they are bug eggs so I just pretend like they are little clusters of seeds - that is what they feel like so it works. Anyway, I put a bucket of soapy water under the leaf because some of the eggs fall right off, and I want them to land in the bucket of soapy water. Plus when they stick to my fingers I just dip my fingers in and they fall right off. I know some of the eggs landed in the dirt, and I don't know if they will still hatch or not - but there wasn't much I could do about it so I tried not to worry about it.

(close-up of recently hatched squash bugs and their eggs)

As soon as I started looking for more, it went from bad to worse. I ended up spending FOUR HOURS searching my four squash plants for egg clusters. They were on the underneath of several leaves, so it took careful attention to detail. It was quite laborious, but I felt like I got them all. Occasionally I found a group that were recently hatched, which was even grosser to me because they look like spiders. I had a serious arachnophobia when I was younger and though I am much better now, I still have a visceral reaction to the sight or thought of spiders. Generally when I put the bucket of soapy water underneath them and brushed them, they fell right into the water. Some of them ran away and I just tried to squish them.

Then of course I went out the next day and found a couple hundred more. Evidently the bugs are egg-laying machines, so it is important to take a three-pronged approach - kill the eggs, kill the babies, kill the adults. I heard if you put a board on the ground, the adults will sleep under it so it is a relatively easy way to kill a bunch of them at once (I've tried this and never found any underneath the 5 or 6 boards we laid out). Another way to find adults is to spray the plants with water around the roots (where they hang out, away from the light) - they don't like being wet, so they crawl up the leaves to dry off. I've been doing this every morning and generally find two or three.

Then, the second problem. While I was out there, I noticed one of the plants was really dead. The leaves were all yellow and limp and it was obviously done with life. I pulled it, and it came right up as though it wasn't attached to anything! Upon further inspection, the plant was rotted at the base of the stem. I came inside and searched and quickly figured out that it was squash vine borers. Although my other three plants (two winter and one summer) seem healthy, I thought I should go check on them...and I can see that they look similar at the base of the vine too.

It doesn't seem like there's much I can do at this point - obviously you can't reverse the damage, and it looks so bad to me that I would be surprised if the plants live. But I suppose it's worth trying. So far, there's a lot more about preventing than getting rid of them: kill the adults before they lay eggs (put out yellow pans filled with water. They are attracted to the color yellow but then they fall in the water and drown), or kill the eggs before they hatch and burrow into the vine (They look like small black dots).

The only option at this point is emergency surgery - cut a slit in the stem where you can tell the borers are doing their damage, and kill whatever borers are inside. The surgery could kill the plant, but it will die anyway, so it's really the thing to do. I guess it's better than nothing. So frustrating!

When I was 8 years old I had a small garden, and I grew watermelon and pumpkins but never got to enjoy the fruits of my childish labor because of the squash bugs. I think I am just not meant to grow squash!

Potato update

It's not good, folks. I noticed the potatoes weren't looking quite as good toward late June - I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I made a mental note to keep a close eye on them. When I returned from my trip, they were noticeably sickly. They had somehow shrank, the color of the leaves had gone from lush green to almost yellow, and the leaves were curled and dry.

My first thought was that they needed water, but I researched potato problems in my books - found nothing other than potato blight. So I googled the symptoms, and diagnosed the problem as "potato leaf roll virus." On the bright side, this won't completely kill the crop...

But on the (much more weighty, in my opinion) down side, it will reduce the quality and quantity of the potato crop, you can't make it go away once it hits, and... it could easily spread to my tomatoes and peppers. I can see the first hints of evidence that it has spread to two of my tomato plants. I'm very upset and honestly, not sure what to do.

These were certified disease-free seed potatoes, and we know nothing has been planted in this spot for years. It's just frustrating to put this much work, time, and money into something and not accomplish the stated goal.

japanese beetles

Well, it happened. I found dozens of Japanese beetles on the beans, and a few on my potatoes. From what I've observed, they are THE major pest to contend with in central Illinois. I was surprised because all of my friends and neighbors assured me that although they'd heard Japanese beetles were a problem, they'd never actually experienced them. I was not so lucky.

I had already been advised that the best way to get rid of them was to take a bucket of soapy water, set it under the plant, and shake the plant gently. Their instinct is to drop to the ground when the plant shakes, so they land in the bucket and quickly drown. I'll spare you the photo of the floating bugs:)

For me, this was only somewhat effective. Any that fell in the bucket were taken care of - they swim around for a while but they aren't able to get out, so they do die (perhaps cruel, I know). BUT the problem was that many of them would fly away rather than dropping. Perhaps the species is adapting, but I don't even think I was able to get half of them. Plus, it might work for certain types of plants but for the beans, it was logistically difficult to put the bucket in just the right spot.

What I found works best is to wear garden gloves, put one gloved hand underneath a leaf with a beetle on it (in case the beetle does drop off), then pick the beetles one by one and throw them into the bucket on the ground. This way they couldn't fly away, and I could tell if each individual was taken care of by the splash in the bucket. I did this three times a day and sometimes it took a half hour, because even doing this one by one some of them escaped (for example, there are often several on one leaf, and they fly away easily). I would do several loops around the bean bed, staying out there until I couldn't find any more. I found that they were the thickest at the hottest part of the day, which motivated me to get out to the garden at a time I would normally insist on staying inside. Also, I've noticed that the beetles are more likely to just drop off the leaf in the early morning before the sun is out, but later in the day they are more likely to fly away.

I was really panicked about this because they did an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time [see sample of demolished leaf photo below], and I found them soon before we were leaving on a week-long trip. When I returned, I was prepared to mourn the loss of my bean crop...


but to my surprise, the beans were living and continuing to grow. Yes, the beetles were still there and yes, they had continued to do damage in the week I was gone. But they didn't destroy any of the crops. They may have stunted their growth, and we will see what happens in the rest of the summer...but for now, I feel like my bean crop is safe. Hooray!

I would recommend taking care of the beetles the way I did. It can seem daunting to remove the beetles one by one, and perhaps gross - but as long as I had gloves on, it didn't bother me to pick up the beetles. And I could definitely tell each day that there were fewer beetles than there had been the day before at that time. Plus, beetles reproduce, so each beetle you get rid of is saving you exponential headache the following year. I would say about 1/3 of the beetles I find are engaged in reproductive activities when I snatch them and dunk them in the water. After they mate, they deposit eggs in the soil that turn into grubs, that turn into more beetles. Best to nip that in the bud!

trellising

We decided to try something new with trellising systems. Mainly because we wanted to do it cheap - tomato cages seem to regularly cost 10+ each, a price we could not afford for 22 plants. We bought bamboo poles, put them in the ground, and zig zagged twine across to support tomatoes. We did a similar thing for the pole beans. The bamboo poles were quite cheap - maybe 10 or 20 dollars total for all we needed for both crops.

It just isn't working, for either crop. We could instantly tell that it wouldn't work for the tomatoes, as the poles weren't strong enough for the plants even before they set fruit. Below you can see a photo of the poles as we were beginning to tie the string around.


The bean poles were better supported, my spouse used anchors and counterweights but it still dragged the strings way down. i thought they would be six feet high but they are less than four feet when we first installed the trellising. The situation has gone from questionable to bad, as some of the bean poles snapped in a storm. My spouse fixed them, but a couple of weeks later the beans have gotten so heavy that the poles are bending way down. I think it is too late to try something new so we will continue to prop up the current trellising systems. The photo below is from the day we first installed the bean trellising.


The poles came in a package so we couldn't really tell how strong they were until we got home and began trying to put them in the ground. I think we both knew it probably wasn't going to be a successful experiment but we tried anyway. I will definitely do something different next year - either I will look for some free or cheap rebar or I will have my spouse build me a large sturdy wooden frame for stringing the twine for the beans. I do not have any ideas for the tomatoes yet - even if we got free tomato cages, I would rather not use them because in my experience they are not strong enough and they are awkward to store. If you've got ideas, hit me.

Beans continued

Here are photos of the baby beans, as promised. The first photo is of the dry soup beans, and the second photo is of the green beans.





We ended up putting bird netting around the green beans because I kept seeing crows hanging out in that bed, and when I would run out there it looked like they were pulling plants out just for fun. Jerks. Turns out that if they were the culprits, they were probably just looking for worms. It seems that they moved on to the carrot bed instead.

Anyway, I wanted to use this post also to talk about one of the problems I've encountered with the beans. Not all of the seed packets make it clear whether that variety is a bush type or a pole (vining) type! I wanted to plant the pole types together, of course, so that it will be easier to build the trellising. It has been a few weeks since these photos were taken, and it is clear we planted one bush type in with the pole beans. That is not the end of the world, but it also looks like one of the ones we thought was a bush type is actually a pole type. This would be tricky to cope with. It isn't certain so we're going to wait and see, but it's a frustration that could have been avoided if seed companies labelled their packages more carefully. In the future, I will take this into account when purchasing my bean seeds.

manure, part 33 1/3

We went to buy 50 bags of cow manure Saturday. When we pulled the truck around to load them up, I noticed the bags said "compost and manure." Looking more closely, it turns out the bags were about 10% cow manure and 90% other materials - mushroom compost, etc. Not what I wanted! I was totally at a loss for what to do. I mean, maybe this stuff would be better - or maybe worse. Do we still mix it with leaves? I just had no idea. We decided to halve our order (because that was all we could take anyway...they were supposed to weigh 25 lbs each but they actually weighed 40 lbs each...) and see what happened.

We prepared one bed - the green beans, which will be two rows of 35 ft each. I layered the newspaper down and even though I would not call the day 'windy,' I ended up having to quickly figure out a way to keep the paper down and just started throwing shovelfuls of the compost on each sheet. I layered the newspapers so that their are 3-4 sheets in each spot, overlapping to make it seamless. Then I gave the newspapers a good soaking, and by then it was sun down so we had to call it a night.

The next day I figured I would go ahead and make a solid layer of compost, so I began putting more down. One problem was that in between the piles of compost holding the paper down, air pockets seemed to form that the compost would actually slide off. It was difficult to spread the compost without tearing the newspaper - that might be one reason to have layers thicker than 1". We then put about 4" of chipped leaves on top, covered with tarps held down by rocks, and we'll wait and see how it goes...

We had enough time to get one more bed started, and my spouse and I were able to work on this one together because he had finished the fence by this point. It was SO much easier with two people! I would lay out the newspaper and he would spray it down - it kept it from blowing away, and I bet the newspaper got more thoroughly soaked. On this bed we piled chipped leaves next (just to experiment) and finished with two small rows of compost, right where the broccoli and strawberries will be planted. Just because we're running out, and well, we'll just see what happens.

Friday night I read online forums about lasagna gardening, and I discovered that although every person seemed to go about it their own way and have their own method, I did not find one person who said it didn't work. So I'm going to try a pretty bare bones approach and see what happens.

We still have not figured out how to get cow manure from our farmer. We did find a little trailer/cart that can haul more than a truck from our local rental place, but it's expensive ($66 for four hours, $88 for a full day) and we do not have access to a truck with a hitch. We chatted with him a little bit at the market and he seemed confident that we could come to a price agreement we'd both be happy with. If we have to rent a truck on top of the trailer AND pay for manure, I don't know...what matters to us is our total cost, not just the price of manure. I have no doubts he'll be fair about that. I do think we'll just get enough for 1" instead of doing the whole 18-24 inches. That would actually mean that we would only have to get about 30 more feet! We can get that in our neighbors truck, shouldn't be a problem. We would have enough to maybe even do the full recommended height for the smallest bed, for comparison. If we pull the tarps off the beds in the spring and find that it's not what we were hoping for, we can always do the recommended layering then and plant directly in it.

A Garden in Pictures, 10/30/10

Finally, we made some progress on the fence and I got some pictures taken! Also, I found an answer to one of my tomato problems! We had a fantastic time at the farmer's market today. I'm sad that it was the last one, but most of the farmers were in a good mood because they're looking forward to sleeping in next Saturday:) Which is to say we had lots of good conversation.

First, the garden. Right now we just have the posts for the fence in...my spouse took off work yesterday to dig the holes and install the posts. He rented a post-hole digger for $12 and we bought some concrete for $16. I wasn't sure about the concrete but he said it was necessary, particularly in the Illinois winters - the ground freezing and thawing tends to push things out of the ground, like our chain link fence. He said it we need to take down the fence, the concrete will come out with the fence posts without too much trouble. I can't remember how much the wood cost right now but I'll see if I can find out. The first photo is the view from the second-story window, the picture on the right is on the ground, looking northeast.



The farmer's market always has a master gardener booth, and I brought this tomato to show them. This is what happened to all of my tomatoes...they looked great when they were green, and as soon as they started to ripen they split and got this cottony/spider-weby looking stuff in the cracks. The master gardeners weren't sure, but they gave me lots of resources. I'm excited to check them out, I'm sure I will make good use of their knowledge next year! I asked my farmer and he said that several of his tomatoes had that happen - it has to do the weather this year, where we had several downpours followed by extreme heat. The tomatoes had too much water and then when exposed to the sun, they grew too quickly. Their outside tomatoes had the same thing happen, but the tomatoes that they had in the hoophouse, where they can control the conditions more easily and the plants are protected a little better, did not have this. I talked to another farmer who lives a little bit further away, who did not have the same problems with his tomatoes this year, and he agreed with our farmer's diagnosis - I think he'd seen it before in previous seasons, but his location was drier so he escaped with many delicious amazing tomatoes this year.

In other news, here is what happens to tomato plants after the first frost.

I was amazed at how different the plant looked! It is totally wilted and shriveled up, and it looked great the night before the frost. I'm going to cut open one of the tomatoes to see how the fruit was affected by the frost. We have several green tomatoes that we were planning to batter and fry, but if the insides of the fruit look anything like the plant I don't think we'll want to use them.

last farmer's market tomorrow

I learned in the middle of this week that tomorrow is the last farmer's market of the season. They won't start up again until early June. I'm sort of feeling a sense of panic! We missed the market last week because when we got there about a half hour before close, everyone had left early. The weather was pretty bad and there weren't enough customers.

The only farmers who do a winter CSA do meat only - no veggies. But things like onions, carrots, and potatoes store well over the winter. They don't even have to be processed. I don't actually know how to store them though - that will be part of the learning next year. Anyway, I wonder why no farmers here offer this service? Maybe they think people only do CSA's for fresh produce and that people won't be willing to pay for local storage crops. A few farms in Eugene offered this, but only to CSA customers - so you wouldn't even hear about it if you didn't know the right people.

I guess this is when I should say to myself that the costs of going through winter without veggies outweigh the good. When the only option is not good for my health, maybe it's time to just buy produce flown in from South America. Or at least buy more frozen vegetables this year. But studies show that the longer you wait to eat vegetables after they're picked, the more nutrients they lose. And they really don't taste as good. So maybe I'm not missing that much. I will miss the farmer's market potatoes. They are truly in another world from conventional potatoes!

searching for good manure

We went to order 350 cubic feet of cow manure on Saturday. I wondered to the saleswoman whether the manure came from pasture-raised cows or feedlot cows, and she figured (as I did) that it was from feedlot cattle. Properly aged and composted manure should not harbor any of the bacteria that are common in feedlot cattle - but I wasn't sure if the antibiotics feedlot cattle are pumped full of would remain in their composted manure. So we decided to wait to place our order until we did some more research.

Sure enough, I found an article showing that antibiotics have been found in vegetables, after using feedlot manure as fertilizer. They report that antibiotics have also been found in organic vegetables. So I began searching the internet for an alternative. Currently I can't find any commercially available manure from pasture-raised cows that is distributed where I live, but we have a friend with a horse stable who told us we could have whatever manure we are able to shovel off the barn floor for free. A good option, but frankly we are under some time constraints right now so I kept looking. Our farmer offered to sell us some of their cow manure, and is even willing to use a bucket loader to help us. He has left it up to us to suggest a fair price. Assuming he accepts what we offer, this option will probably win - except we do not have a vehicle to transport it home in. Our neighbors let us borrow their truck, but we would probably have to take four loads to get the bare minimum that we need - and we don't want to abuse their goodwill.

I've looked into renting a horse trailer or something, but as far as I can tell that's not a feasible option. Perhaps we will offer to do something very, very nice for our neighbors. At this point though, it still looks like we might have to buy the feedlot manure:( We need more organic cows!

tomato problems

We moved to our current home in the middle of summer...probably not too late to plant certain things, but late enough that I decided to wait until 2011 to get the garden going. I did however bring one tomato plant from Oregon. This well-traveled tomato plant made it through the 2300 mile car trip and after initially doing poorly, ended up producing quite a few tomatoes. However, we had quite a few problems with it that I wanted to document so that next year I might avoid them.

First, we bought the seedling from a vendor who had several varieties of heirlooms, someone we had not patroned before. I was told this was a green zebra, but these tomatoes are just typical red tomatoes. They look like they could be heirlooms but I'm not certain. Lesson: be careful who you buy from!

Second, there was a pile of dirt in the corner of our yard that I used to pot the tomato plant for the long journey. My spouse told me it was compost, and I know little about compost so I thought 'great' and potted away. However, it didn't look like healthy soil to me. Since then I have learned that even it if was compost at one time, having sat in our yard for 5 years without new organic materials added...well, it was probably not high quality at the least and it was out in the open, making it likely to carry diseases like...

Third, blight. My tomatoes were so healthy last year that I had no idea what this was when I first saw it, but I found a list of common tomato problems and did a quick google image search for each one. And it was blight. I stuck the plant straight from its pot into the ground, so the soil was not amended with good nutrition. Not sure if this would have made a difference, but healthy plants are less likely to get disease. I'm not sure if this affected the quality of the tomatoes. The few that we ate were not very tasty. The others were eaten by...

Fourth, bugs and worms. Again, had no problems with these last year. Currently the leaves are covered in dead soil gnats. Supposedly the adults are not harmful but I need to figure what I should do to make sure that the larvae do not stick around. Luckily the planned spot for the garden is far away from where the lone tomato was planted, but I do not want to take chances. I did not see many other bugs, just a single stink bug, but something was eating the tomatoes from the inside. There were several worm holes. After the earliest tomato was eaten before fully ripening on the vine, I picked others when they began to show the slightest bit of red and then bring inside to finish ripening on the sunny windowsill, protected from insect invaders. But these seemed to get eaten from the inside out. I should have taken a picture, but I did not. Another weird-looking problem that I'm guessing was a bug or worm is that as they were starting to ripen, the formally smooth skin would be replaced by this weird spider web crack. Anyway, as an organic gardener I'm happy that bugs and worms want to eat my vegetables, but I'm only willing to tolerate so much.

The fifth problem was bees. I'm not totally sure this is a problem - it could have just been that the stress I imposed on the tomato plant delayed its productivity - but I want to watch out for it next year. Most of the blossoms would die and fall off rather than resulting in a tomato fruit. I don't remember this being a problem last year - I remember every single blossom being a fruit. But maybe I didn't watch it as carefully. Anyway, like everyone else I've been hearing that bees are getting scarcer, and living in a residential neighborhood with a few kids around there's always the chance that nervous parents are trying to get rid of them. (My thoughts on that are another blog post for another day.) I know a few others who garden so I will ask them if they've had any problems with pollination, but I plan on planting clover or some other plant that attracts bees close to the garden.