Tagged:tomatoes

Growth

As you may recall, I started late on the garden this year, and decided to minimize the plantings.

I am glad.

I started with this:

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A few weeks later, had this:

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And, now, after 3 weeks away with the garden on the automatic watering, I have more than enough work cut out for me:

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Due to the late start and the cool summer start, I still don’t have any ripe tomatoes, but there are hundreds of green ones. And I can’t wait.

There are a few ripe cucumbers, and I suspect I’ll find a few other early goodies when I clear the weeds, prune the plants, and support the plants that have outgrown their allocated spaces.

Overall, I’m congratulating myself on the decision to downsize the garden this year. At the beginning, when the plants are small, it seems so easy to add just one or two more. But now, when production is in full swing, I’m going to have several hours of work each weekend just to keep the plants healthy and bearing fruit.

The garden/start-up analogy is clear: Plan for growth at the start so that it doesn’t crush you when it comes.

The Next Cycle

Due to living part-time in the Seattle area and part-time at home for 3 months, I haven’t had the time to garden as much as I would have liked. Law? Lots of time for that. Tech? So much I don’t quite know how to process it. But Garden? Well, the Garden took a bit of a back-seat for the months prior to last frost.

Of our 8 garden beds, only 5 are planted (and some not fully). At this time of year, that’s a waste of resources.

But, I have experience on my side. While I know I am wasting space that collects amazing sunlight and could be used to grow beautiful California plants, I also know that each one of those plants sucks the resource of time.

And, if I am honest with myself, I didn’t have enough time to properly prep all of the beds even before the plants need attention. Too many travels. Too much work. So, this season, I am focused on proper execution in the garden. Maximum quantity of quality within the constraints that I have.

Again, my garden is a perfect metaphor for one of the cycles in start-up life (when you could do more, but it would suck time and/or nutrients from other things that don’t have enough to support them unless you scale back for a season).

The tomato seedlings post-planting:

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The eggplants (the big one will be asian purples, the small one below it is a breed of white/pink mini-eggplants):

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And, of course, the peppers:

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Habanero, Hungarian Carrot, Jalapeño, Caribbean Red Hot, & Anaheim.

Already, the investment is starting to show returns. The tomato plants are dark green and easily triple the size shown in the photos above, eggplant fruits are showing, and the peppers are already flowering. Also, several cucumber plants and squash plants are spreading their hungry vines in search of sun. Even with perfect weather, it will not be the biggest harvest I’ve ever prepared, but it is clearly focused on the most high value benefits (e.g. those that produce the most to eat where the taste differential between the garden and the store is the highest).

Thank goodness for learning from the past — this summer/fall harvest is destined to be quite good despite requiring about 1/2 the effort of prior years.

Summer Harvests and Storage

Finally, we’re getting into the time of year when the tomato plants are so productive that we can’t eat everything they give us. The rest of the garden is no slouch either.

Tonight’s gorgeous harvest was limited to slicing tomatoes and paste tomatoes (no cherry tomatoes, no squash, no cucumbers), and even so, I’ve got my work cut out for me over the next couple of days.

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Last weekend, the harvest was reasonably bountiful:

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So, I spent much of the weekend doing the very meditative acts of canning, pickling, and slow roasting.

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I yielded 5 pints of Tomato Sauce from chopped up tomatoes:

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Plus, a tupperware full of slow-roasted tomatoes, 2 quarts of pickled green tomatoes (so delicious!), a quart of pickled squash, and two colorful quarts of tomatoes in their own juice.

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At the end of the canning, the kitchen was a disaster. Imagine an entire kitchen covered with splashes of juice and seeds. Even my shoes were caught in the crossfire.

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I’ve learned, though. This weekend, I’ve recruited help.

Summer Harvests

Summer’s first harvest is always some type of squash. This year, we didn’t grow the Zucchini Romanesco, which is sad, because it’s such an amazing producer (see last year’s huge fruit that kept growing and growing in our weeks of neglect):

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But, we did grow some yellow summer squash that are producing like mad:

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And, our first tomato harvest was a welcome addition to the kitchen:

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Especially the crazy megabloom sweet horizon (it must have been 2 pounds, at least):

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The next week’s harvest was almost double:

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And, most importantly, we finally had enough ingredients to make the first garden Gazpacho of the summer:

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Yummmm….

Independence

This first American Indepence Day that I am experiencing as a sole proprietor, small business owner — it feels very American.

We are staying home.

I am looking forward to catching up on the sleep that I missed closing transactions at the end of Q2 2010.

Also, I’m looking forward to giving our garden some love. Because right now, it’s a bit of jungle:

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Especially, when compared against the garden immediately post transplants, in May:

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Now that it’s finally warm, everything is growing like crazy, including the Nasturtiums:

And, the leeks and onions we didn’t get a chance to harvest in time are now flowering:

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Most people would abandon the leeks and onions post flowering, but I’ve found that if you act fast, they fare reasonably well in bakes, stews, and other long-heat forgiving food preparations.

As for tomatoes, we don’t have much. Just a few cherries from the Sun Sugar that appears to have given up the ghost:

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and, some promising early turning Heinz tomatoes:

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As for me, I look out every day and see all of the green tomatoes and can’t wait for the heat that will make them ripe. Certainly, I may regret the drying, the canning, the stewing, and other means of preservation. But at the moment, I only know one tomato annoyance — and that is impatience for locally grown ripe tomatoes. So, of course, when the annoyance is no more, I suspect I’ll have a different complaint…. wish me well.

It Begins

As a gardener and tomato lover, my favorite garden season is when we get to watch and enjoy the fruits of the Summer garden.

Over the last few weekends, we’ve removed the remnants of the Spring/Winter garden, amended the beds, turned the soil, added an entirely new raised bed (thanks to the husband for the manual labor on that one), rejiggered the watering system, and transplanted and seeded for the Summer’s bounty.

The final result?

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That’s 29 varieties of tomatoes, 4 hot peppers, 5 eggplants, 10 or so okra plants, 1 butternut squash, 3 cucumbers, 1 yellow crook-neck squash, leeks, shallots, garlic, and nasturtiums, and borage to bring the bees. We’re also trying our hand at some lettuces grown in the shade — typically, it’s too hot and they go to seed, but we can always keep experimenting.

The majority of the seeds we planted sprouted (except the yellow squash, so I bought some seedlings at the nursery and will be putting those in today). One new addition that we’re growing from seed is red okra. Historically, we’ve grown green okra, and loved it. But this year it will be growing side by side along its red cousin:

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Right now, they are almost impossible to tell apart, but at some point, they will be quite different.

And finally, we have our aging herb box (that really needs a thorough re-do) and 5 varieties of basil (which will be hilariously overgrown in a month or so):

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