The summer crops are beginning to trickle in. First it was the eggplant, now it's the cherry tomatoes. What will be next? Personally, I'm hoping for a watermelon.
Sunsugar F1 cherry tomato with a windbreak in place. I only did one side because I didn't want to block any morning light.
I think it's helping, there's finally a few flower clusters that have not dropped a single blossom.
The fruits are a vibrant orange color. This photo doesn't do them justice, in full sun they practically glow. The first handful of cherry tomatoes was harvested last weekend and it totally whet my appetite for more. With the windbreak in place I hope the plant can start producing more fruit.
Little Baby Flower F1 watermelons. I think I'll split the 2 melons on the left into their own nets. If I leave the situation alone any longer I fear for the integrity of the fence.
The largest fruit is creeping closer to harvest time. The color contrast between the light and dark stripes is getting less pronounced.
Lil Keeper F1 melons with 6 melons total, so an average of 2 melons per plant. Last year's hybrid melon averaged 4 fruits per plant when each plant was in it's own 16" pot. 3 melon plants in a single 18 gallon tote is definitely 1 plant too many. Less is more!
Netting is forming on the skins of the 2 oldest fruit.
Beaverlodge tomato
Orient Express F1 eggplant looking healthy and gorgeous. Ate the first 2 eggplants last weekend for breakfast. Have you ever had an eggplant omelette? Tortang talong is popular and easy to prepare Filipino dish.
I'm looking forward to a bumper eggplant harvest any day now, several look like they will ripen at the same time.
Yukon Gold potatoes. I stopped watering these plants 2 weeks ago. I can't believe how green the leaves are still. Recent rain I'm sure will drag out this curing process.
Sugar Buns F1 corn. Now all the stalks have tasseled. Unless these plants spontaneously shoot up this year's corn harvest is looking grimmer than last year's. However, I have no other plans for this container, in fact I held on to this specific container to continue my corn growing experiment, so I'm sticking with it and will watch how it plays out all summer long.
Orange Blaze F1 peppers
I used to remove the peppers with sunscald damage, but then that just left the healthy peppers behind the damaged ones exposed to the harmful light doing the damage, leading to more sunscalded peppers, so now they stay.
Bush Goliath F1 tomatoes. Not a lot of fruit on this plant, just 4 tomatoes. I should be worried about its performance, but I'm not. I've spent more than enough time angsting over the Sunsugar cherry and Beaverlodge tomato plants that I can't bring myself to care about this one too. I just look at it, shake my head and move on to something else.
I suspect it doesn't like it's location. I just browsed through older blog entries and noticed no tomato plant placed in this location, close to the black tar covered chimney, has ever performed well. In 2013 no tomato plant was grown here (Beaverlodge was grown just a few feet over and it performed beautifully), in 2012 it was aphids, in 2011 it was leaf curl and adventitious roots. I'm thinking the black tar on the chimney radiates too much heat in the summer.
The plant should be moved, unfortunately there's nowhere else I can move it to since every other garden section already has a tomato plant. To reduce disease transmission all similar plants are separated by plenty of space, this means one tomato plant per garden section, so this plant has no where else to go. For now I'll pull the container away from the wall and think about a permanent solution later. Maybe I should paint the tar white, that could definitely cool down this spot.
Giant Aconcagua peppers.
A plethora of peppers. Whenever I get down about something going wrong in the garden looking at a healthy plant like this is a great mood elevator. I want to harvest a few, but I squeeze tested some and the walls seem kind of thin, I'll give it another week and try again.
Pink Berkeley Tie Dye tomato
I've taken a page from my melon plant maintenance plan and have added supporting rope to each stem growing a tomato. These will be the largest tomatoes I'm growing this year so every little bit of support can help them grow that much bigger.
July 10-16:
Cherry Tomato (Sunsugar F1): 2.125 ounces
Eggplant (Orient Express F1): 9.0 ounces
Total: 11.125 ounces
2014 Running Weight Total: 1 pound, 2.5 ounces
Woohoo, broke a pound!
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