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Garden Update – Sprouts and Starts

This past week I started planting my greens in containers on the back deck.  They are easy to grow and they progress pretty quickly. The idea of having fresh greens right outside my back door is really appealing, too.

I’m happy to report that all my greens have sprouted! The thyme has also sprouted, and this year I’m determined to not let it fry in the sun. I am impressed and happy that leftover seeds from 2010 sprouted, too.  That would be the lettuces and braising mix that I got from the Hudson Valley Seed Library.

lettuce sprouts
Lettuce sprouts
braising mix sprouts
Braising mix sprouts
sylvetta arugula sprouts
Sylvetta arugula sprouts

Thyme sprouts are so cute!

thyme sprouts
Thyme sprouts

I’ve also got tomato starts and peppers that can go in the ground soon.  I am excited about eventually trying all these different peppers and tomatoes. Here’s hoping I have a bumper crop.

tomatoes and peppers
Silver fir and stupice tomato, and peppers

My garden plot downstairs is also doing well – I’ve got two tomato plants in there, and have direct sowed some basil seeds.  I also planted some “bees friend”, calendula, and borage.  I’m hopeful that this will bring me more bees to help pollinate!

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Seed Sowing 2011

Sunday afternoon I started my garden!

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now (ever since my seeds arrived), and finally found some time to devote to beginning the garden for this year. I chose to go with seeds from Seed Savers Exchange this season; last year I went with seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library.  I loved my seeds last year, but wanted to try out another vendor.  I also love what Seed Savers is all about.  Their work is very important.

This early in the season it’s still pretty cold in the Northeast – in fact, it’s been downright frigid here. 20-something degrees in the mornings, highs only in the low 40s. I wore a hat, scarf, and gloves all weekend!  I checked my plot downstairs in the yard, and that dirt is frozen solid right now. So, my solution to getting the garden going while it’s like this is to start my seeds inside, where it’s warm and comfy.

Sprouting Containers and Potting Soil

This year I decided to start all my seeds in cardboard egg cartons.  I considered buying a seed starting system, but the containers are plastic and the little seed starting environment is often made of peat, which is not sustainable. The egg cartons – which I saved up over several months – are biodegradable and compostable, so I can chop them up and dump them in the composter in the yard when I’m through with them. For ease of use, I cut off the egg carton top and security flap in the front of the carton. I’ll compost them this week.

Later on I’ll “pot up” to newspaper pots, which are also compostable.  I found a method that creates a paper pot without a seam (origami!), meaning I won’t have to use tape (two page sheets from the Daily News are a perfect size).  I found tape to be problematic last year – when the paper pots got wet, and the tape just fell of, risking the pot coming apart. Not fun and kind of stressful.

I also chose to use the potting soil from the Lower East Side Ecology Center. “New York Pay Dirt”, as it’s called, is what I used last year to start my seeds in.  It’s well aerated – light and fluffy. It contains coconut coir as an alternative to peat and also contains worm casings made from NYC kitchen scraps. I love working with this product.

I chose to split up the distribution of seeds by giving full cartons to melons and tomatoes, and split cartons for tomatillos, gherkin, and carrots.

What I Planted

This year I’m really excited to try out growing melons, and the Mexican Sour Gherkins are really intriguing. Apparently they taste sour right off, so I think they’d be fantastic fermented.  I’m also determined to have tomatillos fruit this year (it was an epic fail last year – not one fruit from a gazillion blossoms). Here’s a list of what I planted:

  • Charentais melon
  • Eden’s Gem melon
  • Blondköpfchen tomato
  • Silver Fir tomato
  • Stupice tomato
  • Green Husk tomatillo
  • Purple de Milpa tomatillo
  • Mexican Sour gherkin
  • Danvers carrot

These seeds take anywhere between 9 and 12 weeks to fruit post-transplant, so I’ve got a lot of waiting around time ahead of me. However, I’ll also be planting herbs, arugula, lacinato kale, thyme, and some wildflowers, but those are faster growing, so I’ll be able to enjoy the garden bounty in the late spring/early summer. I’m especially excited about the lacinato kale, which I’ll use to make delicious kale chips.  Borage is in the plans, too, which will go great in homemade limeade, or perhaps even in homemade fermented gingerale!

I’ll house my sprouting system to the side and behind the sink, where I can give the plants some light (artificial and natural).

It is exciting to start the process! Stay tuned…

Seed Sowing 2011 on Punk Domestics
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The End of Summer

Although it’s still warm here in NYC, since Labor Day it’s really felt like summer has ended. Once the temperatures become more moderate, it will really feel like fall.  I am of mixed feelings about this – normally I don’t care much about or for fall, in my mind it’s just the transition season to The Dreaded Winter.  I am not big on the frigid weather of the Northeast.  However, this year’s summer was so terribly scorching hot, with multiple 90+ degree temperature days in a row, cooler weather can’t come soon enough.  I am eager for fall.

First tipoff to the transition out of summer – I received an acorn squash in my CSA share this past week.  I’ll save it for a cooler day, though – I absolutely love winter squash of all kinds, so this is an awesome score!

I expect I’ll have some green tomatoes to fry later in the season.  To my surprise, my paste and Prudens Purple tomatoes are still producing!  I really thought the Prudens Purple tomato was on its way out for sure, but there are a few little tomatoes on the plant, and none have blossom end rot so far.

I think the BER problem really was with me – I don’t believe I watered the tomatoes nearly enough this year, which would explain how nutrients couldn’t get to the fruit.  I’ve been watering more intensely this past few weeks, and all the tomatoes are doing much, much better.  I have close to a dozen little paste tomatoes hanging on, too!

The mystery plant – the one that looked like a cucumber plant – is not a cucumber at all.  I think it might be a melon or a winter squash – the fruit is small and hard, about the size of a large fig.  I have no idea where it came from, but I’m enjoying watching it grow and do its thing.

In general, the garden is looking quite rag-tag. The lemon cucumbers are at their end; the tomatillos did not fruit one whit; the tomato plants are looking scraggly.  It’s a little scary looking out there right now.

I’ll be in Portland OR for a few days and hope to enjoy some of the delicious food in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ll bring my camera and take pictures and share some of them here after I return.

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What’s New

Yellow Pear Tomato

So, what’s new:

As you can see from the picture above, my yellow pear tomatoes have started to ripen!  They are a little funny looking, kind of like bowling pins, and they are very tasty. My plant keeps producing them, even as most of my other tomato plants are on their way out.

My paste tomatoes suffered from a lot of blossom end rot, but not nearly as bad as the Prudens Purple.  The mystery volunteer tomato did fine, as did the Silver Fir.  Both of those plants produced small to medium sized fruit. Larger tomatoes just had problems this year.

I had a bumper crop of lemon cucumbers, too.  I will definitely grow those again next year.

Soon, it will be time to pull up the tomato plants and consider what to grow for the fall.  I like the idea of carrots especially, and some more tatsoi.

Apart from the garden, I’ve done a lot of canning.  I made 6 half pints of fig-orange-honey preserves, which turned out great, and keeps getting better as it ages.   The figs came from the backyard trees – can’t get more local than that!

I’ve also canned tomatoes and made salsa – 9 pints of crushed tomatoes, and 4 pints of salsa, 3 of which are lacto-fermented salsa. The tomatoes came from my CSA in the form of a 20 pound tomato share, and were fabulous – really healthy, firm, and meaty.  Not to mention tasty.

I have a lot of nectarines and peaches, so I may make preserves out of that as well.

My social life ramped up for a little while, and that meant dinners out, and less cooking at home.  I’ve also been sick, so little appetite.  This will all change soon.

This weekend I pick up my salmon share! Very exciting!!

More soon!

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Giant Tomato – Prudens Purple

Wednesday morning I was finally able to pick “big bertha” the monstermato on my Prudens Purple plant.  It’s one of the few tomatoes on this plant that did not suffer from blossom end rot.  So many tomatoes on that plant are suffering from this ailment, and it is a real bummer.  I may get a few more whole tomatoes off that plant, but I expect that will be it.

Anyway, behold the tomato!

pruden's purple monstermato

It’s at least 4 inches across and craggy up top.  I think the craggy-ness is another kind of ailment, but I’m not so worried about it.

craggy

Spooky.  It really is kind of scary to behold.

from the top

I’ll eat it in the next few days because it seems really ripe.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that this tomato isn’t purple, as the name of it might suggest.  Not sure what’s up with that.  I just hope it’s delicious!  Apparently it has a similar taste to the Brandywine tomato, a very popular variety it seems.

Will report back on the taste soon.

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Garden Update – Waiting for Red-o

Well, my garden is still pretty green – foliage is thriving, though no red tomatoes are to be seen.  I did spy my neighbor’s garden from the back deck Sunday afternoon, and saw only one red tomato amongst the urban-vast stretches of green, so perhaps our little microclimate is just sluggish in getting our tomatoes to turn red.

The tomatoes that are on the vine are green, firm and healthy… except for another small tomato found with blossom end rot (BER).  This tomato was on the same plant, in the same part of the plant as the other tomato with BER.  Both tomatoes were sharing a branch that created “big bertha”, as I endearingly call her – a gigantic tomato, probably 5 inches across.  I wonder if that tomato is just sucking up all the nutrients, denying the other two tomatoes any chance of thriving.   This question will be answered perhaps if this gigantomato turns red without any rot.

I also picked this beast of a  lemon cucumber last weekend:

lemon cucumbinator

It’s about 3 inches across, by far the largest lemon cucumber I’ve ever seen.  It was hiding under the leaves in the corner, so I’m glad I found it when I did.

Remember this?

mystery plants

This is a mystery plant that appeared under my ground cherries and in the middle of my tomato plants.  I thought it was summer squash but now believe it to be more cucumber plants; the flowers are quite similar to the cucumber flower on my lemon cucumber plants.  I’ll know for sure once it starts fruiting.

I’ve also started harvesting ground cherries.

lemon cucumbers and ground cherries

These ones beat the pants off of the ones I grew last year – they are sweeter, tastier, and bigger.  I believe the quality of soil I’m using is just much better than the soil I had access to at the community garden.  The weather – hot, hot, hot – probably has something to do with that, too.

I really can’t wait until the tomatoes ripen!

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Blossom End Rot

Last week, I believe, I discovered a horrific development in my garden:

BER tomato

My immediate reaction was, “eeuw, gross”!  It really does look nasty.  It was soft and squishy, too. Double eeuw.

This is one of the first tomatoes to appear on my Pruden’s Purple plant.  At first I thought I had come across late blight, but the leaves looked pretty good and healthy, as did the surrounding plants.  So, I did some research and came to the conclusion that this tomato suffered from blossom end rot.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the remaining tomatoes on this plant, and they all look good so far.  The tomatoes on the Silver Fir, Amish Paste, and mystery tomato also look fine – still green and firm, no rot.

My understanding is that blossom end rot has to do with the plant’s inability to absorb enough calcium and/or water.  I have ordered some seaweed extract to add to the soil to bump up the calcium content in the soil, in case BER becomes more prevalent.

I’ve also heard that it can crop up after a heat wave, and that’s exactly when it showed up on this tomato.  We’ve been in the middle of another heat wave this week, but it hasn’t been nearly as intense as the one just after July 4.  I hope this won’t set any BER into motion.

Here’s hoping for healthy tomatoes from here on!