What's Happening in the Garden Today?

[nctomatoman]

Preparing for a long stretch of searing, dry heat in Raleigh....watered at daybreak...rearranged things to provide a bit of support from some of my sagging dwarfs. Rinsed some fermenting seed, saved some additional seed - action in the tomato patch (a few dwarfs starting to color up, a few of the indeterminates as well...) - picked squash and just a few straggling beans (plants starting to rebloom), went on a treasure hunt for developing melons (and found quite a few!).

Rest of today - do some "real" work (been off and on meetings all morning), roast some coffee, poke around the dwarfs a bit more to check on what is about to ripen, pick some eggplant and look more closely at my pepper projects....and get ready for the weekend!!!

[shelleybean]

Today I picked cherry tomatoes and then pulled out another plant with TSWV. Cleaned up the basil and deadheaded zinnias. Picked eggplant, beans and cukes. Watered everything well. Came into the house and made a salad with cherry toms, cukes, feta and basil with a little vinaigrette for lunch. Yum!

[montanamato]

In the midst of record heat, complete with steady wind and humidity around 10 %....I watered the containers for the second time and they had been soaked at 7 am...I can't remember having to water 3 times a day....I do have some larger than normal varieties in 12 gallon grow bags and man are they huge....
Guords , pumpkins, melons , okra and eggplant enjoying the heat ....
We should break a record today as the old record was 105 and we will easily top that...Lows about 62 so still getting fair fruit set....

Jeanne

Michele...That salad sounds great...I only have the basil and feta ....I notice everyone seems to get cherries ahead of main crop tomatoes...That has almost never happened in my garden, often the cherries are even a little later than my main croppers...Of all the varieties I have fruit on , none are cherries, although they are blooming....

[Ruth_10]

Took the entire week off work and thoroughly enjoyed it. Had family (two waves) visiting most of the time. Nice to see them all. Wish we all lived closer.

Am trying to get most of my gardening done before noon on those days when I'm not working--trying to beat the heat and humidity. Found a couple more tomatoes turning color. Some plants have aphids and whitefly and I don't like that, but I've had them every year since we've been here and the plants seem to shrug them off.

Had some Kimberly, broccoli, and cucumber salad for lunch. Picked a savoy cabbage and blanched and froze it--will enjoy it this winter in a soup. Pulled up some spent broccoli plants and dumped them on the compost pile. Deer have been nibbling on the edamame again, sheesh. Have the posts up for the electric fence around the sweet corn but don't have the wire up yet. Will get it up tomorrow, definitely, and will cross my fingers tonight.

Am also keeping my fingers crossed that the vine borers stay away from my squash. Have Buttercup and Guatemalan Blue, along with several types of zucchini.

Seeded some broccoli, cabbage, kale, and Brussels Sprouts today for the fall garden. That is the type of things I have to mark on my calendar, as it feels totally weird to be thinking about fall/winter crops in early July.

[nctomatoman]

What a great day - 3 hours in the searing heat...when you commit to work outside on a day like this (to take advantage a day out of work), you just go for it. (that is after a morning jaunt to the Farmers Market for melons and berries, and a ,mstop at Trader Joe for all sorts of fun but unnecessary stuff!)....

After picking blueberries and squash, I decided to pull out one of my double row of bush beans (I have 3 other double rows that are starting to rebloom, but the ones I pulled looked a bit tired), weed it well and replant. I then watered well, watered my driveway pots, picked some eggplant - then started picking tomatoes. They are starting to come on now! A few pics of today's bounty below, and various plants here and there.

[piegirl]

Made several trips to the compost pile, temp right at
100, searing wind, but low humidity. Worked on adjusting
my shade cloth for the tomatoes. Relocated squirrel #13
across a creek and 6 lane parkway. Watered most of the garden
picked broccoli and parsley for a salad. Impatiently awaiting
the first tomato - a watched tomato just never seems to turn!
Supposed to be 100 tomorrow then much cooler with rain. Only
about a tenth in 4 weeks. Kitty Girl was on the patio table
sniffing the air - so far she is always right - that cooler
weather is on the way. German Johnson and Black Krim just
have to turn one of these days! Piegirl

[nctomatoman]

And so it begins - after finding ripe or nearly ripe tomatoes on quite a few plants, the dining room table is now set aside for tomato triage...and our meals will now be including a few slices of this or that variety as a veggie - and as taste testing. Today, it was grilled cheese with Dubliner cheese and a slab of a one pound pink fruited German heirloom (delicious!) on Trader Joe's pumpernickel - with New Big Dwarf and Golden Dwarf Champion slices on the side!

Spent 3 hours gardening this morning - watering, taking notes, picking, seeking developing melons...watching the bluebird box, as I think that the kids are about ready to leave the next...dug up a few pieces of Salvia Guaranitica to pot up and give a friend - just a nice morning!

[kelleyville]

I woke up to rain! Not a hard rain, just nice and soft and it just kept coming! Actually made it to the ground! I spent the morning checking on the progress of all my plants while collecting buckets of water from the gutter drain! I have lots of new tomatoes appearing too! Only the mini maters my stepson planted from kit from buzzy seeds have ripened so far though, and my neighbors potted ones!

All my potted all alarm hot peppers are doing nicely and I have a pepper on one! I can identify it as Hot Banana pepper! Many more have flowers so any day now I will be able to tell what they are! My green beans have finally started flowering too!

My GardenSoy beans all came up and are showing thier first leaves and my lima beans are starting to flower! For such a rough start of this garden it is really doing well! I saw one new sugar baby so that makes two so far!

It is so nice and cool here today at only 73 degrees and cloudy that I have not been inside much at all! I planted more cucumbers along the back side of the fence and am working on filling a raised bed with sludge from the bog areas that are not really boggy right now!

Everything looks so green after the rain that I just have to go back out there for a little while longer!

It has been a very nice morning and afternoon for me!

[feraltomatoes]

Picked about 12 of these 18 varieties today. Taste test to follow. Some of the plant markers got lost in the rows so I will have to do some looking.
I tried a Green Giant right away as it is one I have been wanting to try, I usually don't count the first few tomatoes as a good sample but this one was already very good for me.
The cherry tomato is Bianca and I find it to be super sweet and spicey and man are they good. For me it gives sungold some competition as a favorite. Only problem is the skin tears if you try to pick so you have to eat them right away or clip them but they are something I thimk alot of people will find special.


http://s19.photobucket.com/albums/b1...t=100_4325.jpg



Green Giant Pl
Green Giant RL
Katinka
Bianca
Lillian's Yellow Heirloom
Mariannas Peace
Sweet Tiny Tiger
Reinhards Black Zebra
Graf Batthyany
Japanese Tomato Tree
Wolford Wonder
Teton de Venus
VB Russia
Purple Russian
White Oxheart
Feuerwerk
Isis Brandy
Beauty Queens Heart

Exciting time of the year as new colors and flavors show off there thing.

[Hilde]

Mmmm, I love looking at the pictures of all those delicious tomatoes! Thank you all for posting them!

Yesterday it started in our garden! Woohoo! I picked 5 beautiful little yellow cherry tomatoes (Sweet Gold), and they were SOO good. Hopefully we will have a handful today too. We will see. I am excited that it has started. I did cheat last week, when I got some beefsteak tomatoes from the farmer's market that were picked the same day I bought them. They were good too, but not as good as our own were yesterday! :-)

I see the Sugary red cherries (and perhaps also Juliet) changing color now. I am very happy, having spent five weeks constantly staring at green tomatoes!

Hilde

[Ruth_10]

More tomatoes coming in--I'm trying to hold off picking them until they're fully ripe, but it's hard. My single Wes plant has only a couple of fruits set (one is very large). I noticed a couple of very large blossoms and am wondering if this is typical for Wes.
DSC_7179 Wes blossom.jpg

Today was the first large harvest of Kentucky Blue pole beans--4.5 lbs. The plants are loaded with blossoms and are considerably ahead of the Blue Lake pole beans. Also picked more Kimberly, cucumbers (Homemade Pickles), a zucchini that is supposed to be Golden, but is not. The other hill of Golden does indeed have yellow fruits. The green tomato is Cherokee Green and the mid-sized one next to it is Picardy. The beans are Kentucky Blue with the exception of a single Fortex bean off to the right.
DSC_7223 14-July-2007 harvest.jpg

Yesterday I set up a drip hose for the pole beans and gave them a drink. Our last rain (0.5 in.) was on June 29 and there's no rain in the forecast. Temps are in the upper 80's to mid 90's and the humidity is on the high side.

[shelleybean]

Pretty veggies, Ruth!

I picked the first of my okra today and fried it up tonight. Very tasty. Also picked my first big tomatoes, Dr. Neal (lost earlier varieties to TSWV). Thankfully the mockingbirds seem to be overlooking the tomatoes for now. I hope I didn't jinx myself saying that! Picked a boatload of beans. Like Jean's zucchini, my "wax" beans turned out to be green. I pick about a dozen cucumbers a day. Picked three eggplants that are also not what they're supposed to be. I'm waiting for more peppers to turn red and gold. Also waiting for zucchini and pattypans. And I'm wondering if the foliage on these potatoes is ever going to die down all the way.

[nctomatoman]

I have to admit that the sheer number of tomatoes I am growing out for the dwarf project - the need to save seeds, taste, document, keep things straight - the mess that this week's storm made of my container plants...still -this is the main event of the season!

Blueberries are about done....Japanese Beetles are making a mess of my basil. The beans I replanted are up - squash and cukes still coming in, and at a manageable pace. Big news today was the first melon - Passport, probably about 4-5 pounds. Breakfast tomorrow!

Lee came by and we had a mini dwarf project tomato tasting, focusing on the greens and yellows. There was much more variation than I anticipated. But we found some stars!

[kelleyville]

We had a gully washer of a rainstorm yesterday evening. Was supposed to have high winds and hail but luckily we did not get too much of that. Surveying the damage this morning and its not all that bad! The amount of rain that came down all at once beat up my potted peppers a bit and flooded the gardensoy bean bed. Had to run out in the rain and move the blocks that make up the bed to let the water out! That is a good thing too though because I know the ground underneath needs tilling in rotation because it is not softening up like I thought it would! Good old hard orange georgia clay! The paths were full of water, several inches but that has drained. My harvest yesterday got me one very large cuke, two flower pot tomatoes, and one big beef hybrid, and of course half a dozen cherry, grape and pear tomatoes! Beans are finally starting to make beans! Can't wait till there are more than two or three! My second batch of beans is up and heading towards the arbor and the ones I planted in a flower box are twirling around on the deck posts!

I thought I would wake up to find my one zuchinni left standing covered in powdery mildew-but so far it is not! Pretty green tropical leaves standing upright! Now if it would make a zuchinni

I am blessed that the hybrid tomatoes did not fall over again! Seems my last bit of staking with ten foot copper pipe held them firmly in place! All the transplanted roma's look healthy and happy in thier pots, with only slight wilt on two of them! Good thing my tomatoes have started producing as my neighbors are back from Florida and thier plants start going back to them today!

The peppers are doing great, well at least the ones that have fruited! Banana peppers daily, the hot banana has fruit now, jamaican hots are turning orange (time to pick), the habanero finally have heads full of buds and flowers, and the Thai Hot is bending over with peppers! Now for the bells, jalapenos, poblanos, anaheim, and chili to take off! What a joy my garden is and all of yours too!

Kelley