Cutting my loses

Yesterday I reduced my tomato crop by 1/4 (I only have 8 plants so I took 2 out.)  They hadn't produced any fruit yet (not even the green kind.)  I figured they couldn't produce fruit in what remains of the season and were only sucking up precious resources from the containers they were planted in.  Hopefully the existing green tomatoes will ripen soon.

Today I hope to thin out my squashes for the same reason -- better to get some crop with fewer than no crop with many. 

My garden has been largely overlooked lately.  It has lost the fight against young kids, camps, camping, and houseguests.  But as little as I have been able to put into it (or harvest from it), it still offers some great rewards.  Like whenever I look out my kitchen window and "catch" the kids snacking on strawberries.  Although I got very ambitious about my garden for a bit and later disheartened that I didn't come close to reaching my vision, getting to watch my kids forage is a pretty great reward in itself.

Making sad tomatoes happy again

It has been a tough few weeks in my garden.  Mostly I haven't found a lot of time to be there.  It's funny how gardening has become like exercise -- you forget how much you enjoy it until get a chance to do it again....

Lately my garden has me worried because everything seems to be growing behind schedule (and what else can you expect in a cool summer.)  I was particularly worried about my tomatoes above.  I thought they caugh tomato blight because the leaves were drooping and yellowing.  I started removing damaged leaves and contacted the hotline at Seattle Tilth for confirmation.  They surprised me by writing back that they thought it might be an iron deficiency due to an inability to take up water.  (The darkened veins and the yellowing from the edge inward led to the diagnosis.)  Well, it sounds like a more optimistic prognosis to me!

So today I finally got back into the garden.  As they recommended, I added an inch of compost to my pot (mushroom compost was what I had handy.)  I sprayed the leaves with kelp water to fertilize.  And I added coffee to the soil.  Seattle Tilth recommended adding coffee grounds -- but all I had was some unused, unwanted ground coffee.  Hopefully, the plants will make a great turn around and I will see no more yellow leaves while the fruit ripens.

Good bugs

And thank goodness, because I left these two alone....  These soldier beetles eat soft-bodied insects including aphids, catapillars, and slugs -- all known to frequent my garden.  I am glad to see some soldier beetles consider my raised bed home.

Wet and dry gardening

I have been harvesting cabbage since my return -- and it finally dawned on me that I was seeing something pretty special.  I bought a six-pack of cabbage starts at Seattle Tilth's spring sale.  The ones that didn't fit in my raised bed I added to my ornamental bed in the front yard.

The difference between my raised bed and my ornamental bed is water.  The ornamentals get none -- I designed it to be drought tolerant and haven't watered it since the first year it was planted.  The difference between the cabbages is visually clear.  The well-watered raised bed cabbage is smooth.

The un-watered ornamental bed cabbage is heavily "savoyed." 

If you click the savoyed cabbage image to get the larger one, you can see why.  The wrinkles and crinkles catch water and hold it (sometimes all day.)  The watered cabbage doesn't need wrinkles because it gets what it needs from the soil.

scaredy cat farmer returns

I am back after a two week vacation in AZ.  Sorry to disappear with out warning, but it seemed wrong to announce I was abandoning my home on the web. 

Predictably I returned to a bunch of bolted produce.

I have managed to clean out the beds and am hoping to get some winter starts in this weekend. 

who stole the apples?

I found two of my makeshift applesox in the grass this week -- and the apples were gone.  I have lost half my crop.  I am thinking whoever left these tracks on the kids' picnic table is the answer....

Could it be a racoon?  If it is, I am sure this garden predator won't have a chance of taking him out.

self-watering containers

Today I made self-watering containers, from scratch.  I put them out on my deck next to my EarthBox Ready-to-Grow kit -- which I put together at the start of June (blame the cool weather -- we still haven't reached 80 -- and my fear of fertilizer for the limited growth of my plants.)

If you look online, you will find a lot of advice on how to make self-watering containers using 5-gallon food buckets or 15-gallon plastic storage bins.  I took that advice and tricked out a Home Depot plastic pot because I wanted something a little prettier for my deck.  I wound up with the kit for expediency's sake.  I had tomatoes that needed planting and all my supplies last month -- but no will to move forward with my project.  The EarthBox kit was very easy.  The hardest part was pulling the sticker off the perforated base that separates the soil from the water.

I think the EarthBox kit was also less expensive than my home-made version was for the same growing space.  But I stand by my project.  My self-watering pots are cuter....

So here is what it took to make them:

• 2 plastic containers
• 2 Ups-A-Daisy planter inserts
• length of PVC pipe
• a power drill with router and drill bits
• cotton string to use as a wick for the water
• 2 cubic foot bag of potting soil
• dowel and styrofoam balls to make water indicator

This is how my helper and I put the pots together.  After enlarging one of the holes (so the PVC could fit), we put the Ups-A-Daisy insert in place and ran 4 strings from top to bottom.  We added a length of PVC (cut at angle at the bottom -- you could also just drill some holes in it so the water can get from the top to the bottom.)  Next I drilled some small overflow holes into my container so I wouldn't have to worry about flooding.  Then we filled our pot with water up to the insert (the EarthBox kit suggested this -- my guess is it helps keep the soil from falling through the holes.)

Then we added potting soil and plants, moved the wicks toward the center, clipped the wicks, and finally covered the wicks with additional soil so they wouldn't dry out.  (Please send happy thoughts to the poor pepper plant below....)

Finally, we made our water-level indicator by putting a stryofoam ball on the end of dowel and clipping it until it fit just inside the PVC pipe.   

Now I know if the dowel does't float to the top, I need to fill the container. I also will put a little landscape fabric cap on my pipe to keep water-breeding bugs out of my pot -- I don't want to have dinner with them on the deck.

I am hoping these fancy pots will give my container garden a fighting chance with my chaotic life.  Now I just need to figure out how to fertilize appropriately....