Are those not the most gorgeous tomatoes, You’ve ever seen? (Sorry…I cannot resist a cheery rhyme about vegetables.)
On Saturday, while I was baking a cake, Naoto was harvesting tomatoes. There were a LOT of bright red ones! And, while he was at the garden, he ran into Haig, a fellow gardener, who added to our tomato bounty.Needless to say, our neighbors got tomato deliveries and we made caprese salads and panzanella this week. (And, if you live close and would like a tomato or two…please don’t hesitate to ask!) On Saturday afternoon, we finally cooked up my lima bean harvest…what you see above is the tiny ramekin that held my lima snack… Yes, we steamed a giant pot of water for less than two dozen tiny beans! I would love to try to grow limas again next year because they are soooo good when they are fresh! Even Naoto (a self-described lima hater) enjoyed one!
That’s about all of the harvest for now…still waiting to see if we will have a cucumber or a watermelon…in the meantime, it’s all tomatoes all the time! No complaints here!
This week at the garden, I was informed that I bought “terrible tomato cages”.
Thanks for the “advice”, fellow gardener…a couple of months too late.
This first year has been all about learning. I didn’t remember from my dad’s garden (which is about twenty times the size of our plot) that tomato plants grow this much. I didn’t do a lot of research about each of the tomato varieties that we planted, but if I had, I would have learned that Brandywines (the tomatoes pictured above) are very heavy, and tend to weigh the plant down a ton. We should have staked it with a pile driver. (Kidding.) Now that we are harvesting the tomatoes, I feel like as long as we can keep the plants standing and producing, we’ve succeeded for Year One.Right now, since we cannot turn back time and buy sturdier cages, we are doing what we can to keep the plants stable and (as much as possible) out of the walking paths in the community garden. We bought some sturdy stakes and have tried to situate them in a way that holds up the cage along with the fruit-laden plants. We also brought some twine to the garden so we could tie up the wayward branches (as seen above on one of our Early Girls). Our garden plot isn’t going to win any Garden of the Year awards–especially considering the Wild West portion (pictured above…seriously, have you ever seen such a mess of plants?!) but we are really happy with our tomato harvests so far. We’ve pulled juicy red tomatoes from each of our four varieties and they are all sweet and delicious and there are many, many more green ones in waiting. As long as we can keep the plants standing, I’m sure we’ll be eating tomatoes throughout August and into September. We’ve also harvested a few more peas and some lima beans–not quite enough to make a side dish, but enough for me to have a first little taste of freshly picked peas and limas…a win in my book.
Above is our first summertime harvest from the garden on Saturday. Small, I know…but things are just getting started. We picked our red Juliet tomato on Saturday afternoon before heading to the progressive dinner. We sliced it in two and toasted our first home-grown tomato. The peas were a little bit of a surprise, since they were planted in the Wild West portion of the garden and it’s hard to see what’s going on with them (a rookie mistake!) There are quite a few smaller peas still out there, but these three were ready to be picked and they were sweet and fresh and perfect.
In the “garden challenges” department…yesterday I received a tweet from Mr. Brownthumb about a fallen tomato plant. Sure enough, when I went to the garden later in the afternoon, I found this: So, lesson learned…get larger, sturdier, more expensive tomato cages… At this point, it’s too late, but you can bet that Naoto and I will be doing some research over the winter to learn better ways to support our tomatoes next year! We just need to support them long enough to produce their little fruits and keep them out of the pathways. I re-staked the fallen Brandywine plant and tied up more wayward branches. The garden isn’t pretty at this point, but more tomatoes are turning and that’s really all we asked for in our rookie year!
On Saturday night, the community garden board hosted a progressive dinner for all of the gardeners in the Forest Park Community Garden. Naoto and I had a really fun time getting to know all of our fellow gardeners. We’ve decided that gardeners might just be the nicest group of people around (gardeners and letter writers, for sure!)
We all met at Amelia’s for a drink and then we walked to Bambi’s house for tapas and mojitos. We could have ended the night here…there was so much food! At Gina’s house, we enjoyed grilled pizzas and sangria. Naoto and I brought basil from the community garden planters and from our balcony and Gina made a magical tomato, basil & mozzarella pizza with it. At Michelle’s house, we enjoyed dessert–a homemade plum clafouti and an ice cream pie (generously donated by Brown Cow!) Every step of the evening was just perfect, and even an unexpected rain shower didn’t spoil our festivities!
Have you ever done a progressive dinner? This was our first one and it was loads of fun, especially for a group who was just getting to know each other. Walking from house to house gave us an opportunity to mingle with more people, either on the walk or in a different seating arrangement at each house. I think it just might be the most ideal way to break the ice with a group of new people.
Randomly, it’s the only one…all the others are green as green can be.
But this little red tomato gives me hope that maybe, just maybe we will have a tomato crop yet! It’s hard to see up there, but our tiny pepper plant, dwarfed by the tomato giants, has four tiny peppers on it. And, I’ve spotted a few peas and a few limas…we still need to finish conquering the wild west portion of the garden before I can really see what’s going on though. It has been hot, hot, HOT here all week, so gardening has consisted of weeding and watering as the sun goes down.
Tomorrow night, we are going to a progressive dinner hosted by the board of our community garden. Naoto and I have met some super-nice people in the garden and we are looking forward to hanging out with everyone outside of the garden (and of course talking about gardening!)
This morning, I headed over to the Hines VA Hospital for their weekly farmers market. Since the Forest Park market isn’t happening this year, the Hines market is going to be the next best thing. Well, it might be anyway…it’s pretty small.
That’s it up there…thankfully there is a lot of signage at the Hines campus, because, really, if you blink, you might miss it. There were a few farmers and a few people selling bottled products (vinegars, honey, salsa) and there was a bakery. One farm was selling berries and plums and green beans and they were serving freshly grilled corn. Yum! Another farmer, Jessica of Purple Leaf Farms, who I know from our Forest Park Community Garden, was selling greens and turnips and flowers. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves over the summer. As more fruits and vegetables mature on the farms, I’m sure there will be more offerings, but for now, I’m happy with my tiny purchase of gorgeous blackberries and pretty blooms.
Saturday was the last of a string of perfect summer days–low 80s, no humidity, sunny skies, gentle breeze…
Naoto and I had grand plans for the day, but we ended up lounging around on the balcony enjoying the weather and soaking up the rare gem of a summer day in Chicago. While Naoto caught up on reading the Japanese news (hence the laptop), I watered the plants, caught up on some letter writing and worked on cleaning my thrift store typewriter. It was a nice feeling of lazy productivity. While we were outside, this was happening inside: After lounging all day, it felt good to put on a dress and walk down to Cafe DeLuca for drinks and dinner. They make the best limoncello martini…a perfect drink for summer.Today, when I walked outside and into the thick-as-pea-soup, heavy and hot air, I decided that we made the right choice on how to spend a summer Saturday.
Naoto and I are the new poster children for Gardening in the Wild. One look at our plot and you can tell we are a) first time gardeners and b) total procrastinators. We’ve known since we planted our watermelon and Japanese cucumbers that we needed to build something for the vines to grow UP (rather than OUT) and we just haven’t done it yet. We hope it’s not too late to build something this weekend.
And, we need to stake our peas (those are in there somewhere between the limas and the Juliet). It’s going to take both of us to figure out where one vegetable ends and the other begins.
To add to the challenge of vining plants everywhere, our Juliet tomato has grown OUT. OF. CONTROL. (That’s its stem pictured up above.) I’m not sure if it’s just a freak-of-nature or if we totally messed up when we were caging it, but the cage is now tilting east and the tomato is reaching all over the garden and spilling into the area beyond our plot. It’s producing loads of tomatoes, so even though it’s taking up more than its “square foot” of real estate, I’m not complaining…I just need it to lay off growing over the limas and into our neighbors’ plots!
In other tomato troubles, yellowing, spotted leaves were starting to spread throughout our plants. After a little bit of research (if you count calling my dad and searching YouTube “research”) we found this video from The Rusted Garden:
Basically, we found that the yellowed leaves are caused by either not enough nitrogen in the soil, over-watering or inconsistent watering (letting things dry out too much and then overcompensating). Most of the gardeners recommend removing all of the diseased leaves and then spraying the leaves with either wettable sulfur or a mix of baking soda and water. On Wednesday night, Naoto and I went through all of our tomato plants and cut off all of the diseased leaves. We didn’t spray anything on the leaves because we were working in full sun (this can burn the leaves). On Saturday, we are going to check things over and spray the leaves at sunset. All of the tomatoes in our community garden are affected by the yellow leaves, so it feels good to know we aren’t alone.
In spite of the leaf issues, all of our plants are bursting with tomatoes! I just can’t wait until one actually changes from green to red! And, our tiny pepper plant finally has some tiny peppers! This poor plant is on the southeast corner of our plot and I’m afraid to admit that it’s getting overshadowed by our overgrown tomatoes. Hang in there, little guy!
So that’s the garden this week. If you have any advice or ideas for taming the crazy, feel free to comment. Just don’t burst my bubble of hope and tell me it’s too late to wrangle up those vining plants!
The garden is booming with excitement this week. We went last night to water and check on the progress and I found a teeny, tiny Juliet tomato!! (Pictured above in the center of the picture…isn’t she a beaut?) I couldn’t contain my giddiness! All of our other tomato plants (the two Big Boys, the Brandywine and the three Early Girls) have blooms but so far the Juliet is in the lead.
Everything else is doing well, except the loofah that never grew and the slug-devoured limas are still up in the air. We’ve harvested a few daikon and they are pretty small…tasty, but small. We want to buy another pack of seeds and try them again.
This weekend, when we aren’t eating and working, we will be gardening. We can’t wait very much longer to get a handle on our vining plants. So far they are behaving, but it’s only a matter of time…
Naoto and I spent some time at the garden on Saturday afternoon and again last night. We are both amazed at how much the plants grow within such a short few days. Here are a few shots of our garden, complete with my homemade plant markers:
And, in the most exciting news of all, our Juliet tomato already has a blossom!!
And, now that the vining plants are growing (except for the loofah…the loofah is doing nothing), we have to come up with a plan for handling the vines. We’ve seen some good ideas in other garden plots, so we just need to buy our materials and build something simple.
And, in our first gardening challenge, our limas are being eaten by…something…a rabbit? A bug? Who knows. But the whole crop is not looking good. I still have hope that maybe one or two plants will produce some good ol’ lima beans…
One thing that’s been fun and helpful for me so far this gardening season is participating in #SeedChat (with @SeedChat & others) on Twitter. It happens on Wednesday nights at 8pm CST and it’s a great way to “meet” other gardeners and ask questions (if you’re a newbie like me) or offer advice (if you’re an experienced green thumb). If you’re into gardening, check it out!
Are those not the most gorgeous tomatoes, You’ve ever seen? (Sorry…I cannot resist a cheery rhyme about vegetables.)
Needless to say, our neighbors got tomato deliveries and we made caprese salads and panzanella this week. (And, if you live close and would like a tomato or two…please don’t hesitate to ask!) 
On Saturday afternoon, we finally cooked up my lima bean harvest…what you see above is the tiny ramekin that held my lima snack… Yes, we steamed a giant pot of water for less than two dozen tiny beans! I would love to try to grow limas again next year because they are soooo good when they are fresh! Even Naoto (a self-described lima hater) enjoyed one!
kimberly ah 