June 17, 2010: The Mid-June Garden (part 1)

This weather is unbelievable! Our normal temperature for June 16 is 83F. Yesterday it only got up to 69F. Our low temperature should be around 55F, or even higher, and it dropped to 49F. The past two mornings the furnace has been running when I awakened, where normally I'd have my windows open at night to cool the house. My tomatoes will never ripen in this weather.

Speaking of tomatoes, look what I discovered smack dab in the middle of my sugar snap peas yesterday.



I've no doubt it's a Juliet tomato, as that was the only one growing in that area last year, and I've been hoeing out the volunteers for weeks. This one escaped me, and she's over two feet high, so I think I'll let her live.



Here is another volunteer that will get a chance for life this year. I'm hoping it is the child of Interpretive Dance. Please, do click on that link to read about Interpretive Dance. She was such a valiant and brave little Green Grape tomato, who overcame great odds to survive. When I left for Arizona last October, she hadn't yet given me any tomatoes, and she was suffering from a lot of frost damage, but I was too busy to bother ripping her out and disposing of her. When I returned home this March, there was Interpretive Dance, still clinging to the fence in death. I said a final farewell, and ripped her out by her roots. As I tore her free from the land, three little squishy tomatoes fell to the ground from her dead body. Interpretive Dance had lived, and she had given birth to fruit! Now a volunteer has grown in her place, and I am protecting it with my life. Well, I'm actually protecting it with a tomato cage and a loop of the garden hose, but I am protecting it, non the less. Please, let this be her child and not the offspring of the nearby cherry tomato that was healthy and productive and absolutely tasteless.


Elsewhere in the garden......

The Little Marvel peas are loving the cool weather.
I still haven't picked any, but they're getting close.


I've recently shown you my two main lettuce beds, with their lattice shade structures, but I haven't shown much of this lettuce patch that grows in the shade of my indeterminate tomatoes. Most of the front row has been harvested, and a triple row of carrots has been seeded in their place. This is why I grow my tomatoes in buckets. If they were planted directly into the bed, there wouldn't be room to grow crops on either side of them. This 4' wide bed has a double row of bush beans on the other side of the tomato buckets, so I'm getting a lot of food from a small space. Lettuce varieties in this bed are Buttercrunch and Austrian Red in the back row, and Anuenue in the front row, next to the carrots.


A closer look at Austrian Red and Anuenue. Except now that I look at the photo, I think just the one on the left is Anuenue and the next two are Buttercrunch. This bed was attacked by birds early on, and some of the lettuces had to be replaced with new seedlings. Only three of my Anuenue seeds germinated, and I vaguely remember only one surviving. I'll have to make sure I harvest that one head for a taste test, before it bolts. I was hoping I could leave some in the garden to see how long it would grow before bolting.


On the other side of the indeterminate tomato bed, the Contender bush beans are blossoming, and tiny beans are forming. All four tomato plants have blossoms, and I noticed a small tomato on the Cherokee Purple yesterday. The ugly green buckets, that the tomatoes are growing in, aren't even visible any more. If we'd get a few days of warm weather, the entire tomato structure would probably be hidden by foliage. In the background, one of the three barrel containers of corn is growing taller.


These indeterminate tomatoes, growing behind the garden shed, are also doing very well. They don't get quite as much sun as the ones in the raised bed, so they are just a little bit behind in maturity. This area was unplanted last year, except for a volunteer cherry tomato, and enriched with leaves, pine needles and grass clippings. The compost barrel also sat back here, and that's where the volunteer squash in the foreground came from. I'm hoping it's a yellow crookneck. I think that was the only kind of squash that got composted.

Here's "Tomato Row", with its five pots of tomatoes, four of which are dwarf varieties. This area of the garden was fenced last year, but I removed the fencing for easier access this year. I was going to pull the fence posts, but decided they'd be good for securing these bottomless pots of tomatoes. Mr. Granny has managed to hit only one of the pots with his lawn mower so far. Minor damage to the pot, none to the plant. The dwarf plants are so pretty! They are stocky, with really thick dark green leaves, unlike the plant in the front pot, which is a determinate tomato, but not a dwarf variety.

Again, the dwarf varieties seem to take very well to pots, even these that have their bottoms intact. Soon this ugly green bucket should be hidden by the leaves of the nearby zucchini plants.


The Black Beauty zucchini is growing well and blossoming, although all the blossoms are male. Already I've detected a bit of powdery mildew on these leaves, so I gave them a good spray of diluted milk yesterday.


This Grey Zucchini is definitely under performing, and already covered with powdery mildew. It was terribly susceptible to it last year also. I gave it a good spray of the diluted milk too, but I'm thinking I'll probably just pull it and plant another Black Beauty here. You can see the large leaf of the other plant to the right for a size comparison.