Gardening update

[tagryn]

The tomato crop has started producing. So far we've gotten four red, ripe...well, I guess I'd call them cherry tomatoes, though this variety ("Large Red Cherry") is certainly bigger than the Sugar Sweeties we had last year. Still pretty tasty, though. I also got a cucumber and a green pepper off the plants yesterday, which made for a pretty satisfying harvest. Nothing yet off the regular-sized tomatoes yet, but there's a lot of growing fruit which should start coming in sometime soon. I think the tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers will continue being regular producers through the rest of the summer, I'm happy about that.

The one picking cucumber I have in has wilted despite regular waterings, along with one of the regular cucumbers and one of the tomato plants, which isn't good but I suspect par for the course. Of the three Icelandic poppies I've been trying to nurse through the summer (they do better in cooler temperatures), one is pretty much lost, one is struggling, and the other is doing pretty decently. I'm thinking about planting the struggling one in shade and hoping it turns around. I've finally figured out how to get seeds from the poppies, so I'm trying to grow some from seeds I'd saved a couple months ago. We'll see if that works out.

On the positive side, one of my gardenias is flowering again, and the black eyed susans and miscellaneous wildflowers are doing very well. My baby pitcher plant is still hanging in there, I suspect its still adjusting a bit to being outside and in a larger pot. We got the registration forms for the county fair last week, and I'm planning to enter a sprig from my comfrey plant in the herb competition. That's assuming there's any left of it after the Japanese beetles have eaten their fill, of course. Fortunately the plant is a fast grower, which is why it was traditional praised as a livestock feeder.

We have frogs in the rain barrel again, I'm guessing the recent couple weeks of relative dryness made him search for the nearest regular water source. With the dryness some of the leaves on the apple tree have turned brown and started dropping already, almost certainly a product of the cedar apple rust infection I'd reported on in earlier posts. It's been two weeks since I first sprayed the trees with a fungicide, so I'll probably repeat the treatment this weekend and let things go for a while. Donna said she thought the one tree definitely looked better a couple of days after getting treated, so it seems to be doing some good.

Comments

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oooo... neat to know how your garden is growing.