What's wrong with my Tomatoes?

I'm finally getting tomatoes from the vines (because it's finally been almost warm enough for tomatoes... still not warm enough for eggplant!)

And I've got a few problems with my tomatoes. Of course, having only grown tomatoes for a few years, they may not be problems, it may just be normal, but here goes. I'm a little panicky and I'd love for someone to tell me what is wrong and / or how to fix any problems you see. I've already decided that they are too close together (who knew that composted horse manure + too much rain = gargantuan tomato plants?) I don't spray with anything (yet) and I'd like to keep it as non chemical as possible (please don't make this a debate about to spray or not to spray, I just want some tomato advice. Fewer chemicals is a personal choice, I'm not judging anyone else's gardening style, just letting you know my preference.) I haven't fertilized since we added the compost to the soil this spring, I haven't watered more than twice all summer thanks to the constant overcast and cool weather.

Okay, so now that the disclaimers and what I'm doing is out of the way, the problems:

One of them has curled leaves really badly, but it's only one plant, which makes me think it might just be plant stress since this one is on the end of the row?

Spotted leaves - a few of them are getting this weird yellow mottled look to them and it looks nothing like the normal "this leaf is too old and I'm getting rid of it now" yellowing that the plants usually do.
Close up view of the spots - yellow and brown, is this normal?


A few of the plants have leaves that look like their edges are rusted and their middles are super shiny and raised, almost puffy.



A couple of plants have some leaves that are curing in, only not really curling so much as growing in an umbrella shape.


Then there's the fruit. I think this is BER, b/c I had lots of problems with that (too much rain earlier) but I'm not sure b/c of the white stuff.

And the other fruit looks sort of normal, but I've never seen the horizontal scaring before.

Any ideas? Any of this normal? Any of this need to be quarantined?

Anticipation Is a New Vegetable

Having never grown Kohlrabi before, I have been carefully watching its habits. 9 to a square for the square foot method seems to be adequate so far. And can you see it, there among the leaves?


The beginnings of a bulb of Kohlrabi!

I have no idea what it will taste like or how much longer before I'll be able to find out, but it is eating me up with anticipation (no pun intended). What a strange little alien looking plant.

Magic Peas

Planted on St. Patrick's day, I've been impatient for peas. in the past few days I have been rewarded with lovely white flowers that look like ladies in white bonnets glancing shyly over their shoulders. I can just imagine how pleased they must be to see a gentleman bee come a courtin'.

In the evening, when the light hits a pea pod in just the right way, it glows. I shall always think of peas as being magic because of this beautiful trick of the light.

Square Foot Salad

Salad lettuces, spinach interspersed, chard, kale, collards, peas, carrots, kohlrabi (never tried this before, I'm SO excited!), nasturtiums, a few beets, even some red cups full of slug bait! My favorite is a mixed green salad fresh from this bed with a little vinegar and olive oil, it just tastes like spring.

Cool season crops seem to grow so fast, this is only a week later!

Kohlrabi, Ruby Chard and Spinach

Tasty Lettuces and Nasturtiums

Frugal Cutworm Collars

You loving raise plants from seed. Or you buy them at a healthy stage from a nursery and bring them home and lovingly plant them. Either way, they are your little vegetative babies. So imagine your surprise when one morning you go out to survey your growing yummy goodness and you see one of your little darlings cut down! Chomped down is more like it. Cutworms are nasty little buggers that seem to delight in cutting down healthy little seedlings before their stems are thick and strong. They delight in making a meal not out of the leaves and flowers, just the stem. Just cutting down the whole plant. If you find such damage in your garden, pull away the first half inch or so of mulch and dirt in a 3 to 6 inch radius around your casualty. You'll probably find the culprit, snoozing off his stem feast. Squash him, otherwise you'll have another casualty the next morning.

To combat cutworms before they start their lumberjack ways, I use cutworm collars. Some folks like to use yogurt cups and cut the bottoms off to make a ring of plastic protection around the plants, others buy the fancy ones from garden supply stores. I've had good luck so far with something a little more prevalent and a little more lazy. I present the humble toilet paper roll.


I know what you're thinking: it looks awfully ghetto. However, I don't have to cut the bottom off of anything, I simply gently ease the roll around the seedling and press it into the soil about an inch. The beauty in my mind is that the rolls can be composted once they've served their cutworm protecting purpose. And I figure I KNOW I'll use, er, the other stuff that comes on a roll, so after saving them up all winter long, I have an abundant supply.

Raised Beds Revealed!

Ba bu bu BUM!!!! All of my cowboy's hard work is now planted!
Aren't they lovely?


The wood ones are last season's handiwork. The Trex ones are this season's addition to our garden space. All finished, filled with topsoil, mulched, planted, and trellised. He is such a dear, the only parts I had to be responsible for were the mulching and planting. We put up the U-posts and netting together, which made the whole process go much more smoothly.

Wildflower Alley

Wildflower Alley Update from this past week.

Daisy's and Wallflower (at least I'm pretty sure that the orange is wallflower)


Blue Flax is the feathery blue in the foreground. Can you imagine that in ancient times people made linen out of that? I sincerely hope it grows larger in Mesopotamia! The pink and red are (I think) Sweet William.


Dame's Rocket is just stunning, especially with the orange wallflowers underneath. I secretly love it when folks drive around the corner and slow down to see these flowers.

I've actually had a love affair with Dame's Rocket for a few years and never knew it. This lovely showy flower grows wild next to a creek along my drive to work. Every spring for the past 3 years, I've driven by them and thought "one of these days I should figure out what those are so I can plant them in my garden." I was absolutely thrilled when they started shooting up this spring!

Bean Monsters

These little guys are so much fun. One day you've got a nice, quiet bed of mulch.
The next, you've got little mounds of mulch that looks like small underground monsters pushing up from the depths.

And then you've got beans!

If you're away for more than a few days, you miss all the action. I love how violently they emerge from the earth. Break free, little beans, break free!

Blackberry Winter = FROST!

Seriously!? Frost is in the forecast? What kind of crazy spring is this? So much for Mother's day being our last day of frost in this part of VA. To deal with this blackberry winter (that's what my grandmother always called it when we got a late cold snap while the blackberries are blooming), I've covered my little seedlings in the garden with newspaper. They're calling for frost again tonight, so I'll take pictures of my little hobo garden. One or two sheets of newspaper lightly draped directly over the plants is enough to protect them for just a night. If we were going to have long term (a week or more) cold, I might invest in some floating row covers, but for just a night or two, I can get away with newspaper.

Garden frost protection falls into two categories: those that can be left on during the day and those that need to be removed. And those categories change as the daytime temperatures rise.
Those that can be left on include:

• Milk cartons with their bottoms cut off and their lids left off. This is great for a few prized tender plants in the garden (Basil, Eggplant, Peppers to name a few). But if your daytime temps are going to be above about 70, you should remove these to keep your plants from baking.
• Floating Row Covers. Some folks leave these on their crops all summer to prevent pest damage too.
• Water Walls. These little guys go around each individual plant and can stay there all season if you wish, but most folks remove them. The cheap way to do this is to fill multiple water bottles and surround the plant with them. Again, only cheap if you've just got a few plants. I've got 24 peppers and 38 tomatoes.... not an option for me.
  

Those that need to be removed: Basically anything that can cover the plant and keep the frost from forming directly on the leaves but that won't allow sun and air to the plant for days on end.

• Bed sheets - cover a lot of space quickly
• Newspaper
• Pots turned upside down over your plants
• Straw or other loose mulch

With any luck, these cold nights won't last long and my little plants will be just fine with a little protection.

Planting day!

Mother's day weekend turned into the garden weekend to beat all garden weekends. I planted in two days all of the following (a star means it's near a trellis for future support):

Tomatoes - 38 Total
7 Cherry:

• 1 Blondkopfchen* (Little Blond Girl)
• 2 Black Cherry*
• 1 Camp Joy*
• 1 Hawaiian Currant*
• 1 Gardener's Delight*
• 1 Ghost Cherry*

17 Paste

• 6 Roma
• 11 Early Annie (odd number, I know, but I sold more plants than I intended

14 Slicing

• 3 Mr. Stripey*
• 4 Mexico*
• 3 Cherokee Purple*
• 1 Brandywine*
• 3 Eva Purple Ball*

Lots of Beans

• October Beans (for beans and greens and cornbread, quite possibly the most perfect comfort food ever!) - 8 square feet
• Bush Beans - Early Contender - 8 square feet
• Pole Beans* - Kentucky Wonder - 10 linear feet, about perfect for fresh eating and some sharing
• Soybeans - Beer Friend (for edamame) - 18 seeds - these will be succession planted over then next 8 weeks so that we can have a tasty treat every few weeks this summer.

Squashes a plenty

• Cucumbers* - Burpless and White Pearl - 8 seeds - this will give us enough to share!
• Yellow Crookneck Squash* - 3
• Spaghetti Squash* - 3
• Pumpkin Lumina - 3 (I know, I'll kick myself later for not trellising these)
• Zuchinni - 2

Eggplant - Black Beauty - 2

And 24 Peppers

• 5 Jalepeno
• 5 Banana
• 7 Sweet Bell
• 7 Garden Salsa

I also replanted some volunteer Cilantro, a pot bound Thyme, and some hostas that a friend gave me. Oh, and Marigolds everywhere. Oh, and some sweet alyssium for a pop of color. Oh, and zinnias for more color. Oh, and the alpine strawberries that I started from seed. (I think that's everything.)

In the Front Yard, I also planted 80 Gladiolus, several handfulls of zinnia seeds near the house, and I made a little zinnia patch near some mailboxes that aren't ours.

Quite an exhausting weekend! Pictures of all of these will follow in the coming days. For now, my poor hands are a little chapped from playing in the dirt (I try to remember gloves, really I do.) And my hamstrings are definitely feeling toned after all of that squatting and standing! Gardening is my favorite work out.

Herb Garden

My cowboy has been hard at work!


It has been my dream since we moved in 2007 to have an herb garden close to the kitchen door. Here it is, less than 10 steps from the door in a small sunny spot that gets full sun about 7 hours a day! The old barn beams were sealed with a non-toxic bug proofer last fall and they've been sitting, weathering, waiting for warmer spring days and a thawed out ground. I love that the beams are large enough to sit on while harvesting seasonings, and that they will make such a lovely backdrop for all manner of leafy yummy goodness. He dug down to make sure that there was enough dirt around the beams to keep the bed in place and used a gargantuan drill bit to drill holes for rebar to further reinforce the beds. And now it is my job to plant it full of herbs! YAY!

Cheerfulness Under the Tree

My all time favorite bulb, cheerfulness.


I love the way it looks, smells, waves in the wind, everything about it! Really, this little flower reminds me of a spring break trip I took in high school to England (the one and only time I've been across the pond, so to speak). A friend and I were roaming the streets and stopped at a flower vendor. A lovely lady with a thick English accent told us that they all grew on her farm a few miles out of town and my friend and I just couldn't resist a 3 pound piece of English countryside. She chose red tulips and I chose cheerfulness. So here they are, my planted memory. I love the fact that the tulips and cheerfulness came up at the same time! What memories have you planted in your garden?

Damping Off!

The plague of every start from seed gardener has finally hit me. I've started seeds for 3 years now and never had this problem before, but this year, I've lost most of my lavender, thyme, and alpine strawberries to this awful fungus condition! Brought about by top water, not enough air movement, and slightly too cold temperatures in the basement. Damping off (insert link) is not just my problem, but washing seed trays (or egg cartons in my case) in hot soapy water every spring will help stave it off, as will consistent bottom watering instead of top watering with a mister. Now I've learned my lesson. Anyone else have this problem this cold spring?

Raised Beds

My cowboy has been hard at work!

I love craigslist! I found some Trex boards there last fall for less than half price from a fellow about 15 minutes away that had overbought for his porch. And now my hardworking cowboy has made them into more raised beds! For these, he is determined that they will be level, so the process is methodical and steady (just like my man). Check back after the rain stops for the unveiling of the raised beds so far!

Wildflower Alley

One of the first things we did in the Maple Tree Garden was kill grass. There's a section of right of way that has an awful hill to mow and it's outside the fence and right next to a road. So grass there is pretty much pointless. So we killed it, tilled it, and planted wildflowers. I think our neighbors thought we were nuts.... until they saw this


We had folks slowing down to look at the flowers, which is a really good thing because it's kind of a blind corner and lots of kids walk back there. We even had a few people come up to the front door and knock to tell us how pretty the flowers were. And this spring we were out there pulling up baby maple trees (story of my gardening life) and folks were stopping to ask if the flowers were coming back.

It looked a little hopeless and weedy in mid March

And then a little better in Early April

Mid April was filling in.

End of April it is looking much more like a flower garden.

The evolution of the wildflowers is so neat to me. I love how last year there were so many annuals (I'm actually going to reseed annuals this year. American Meadows has great seeds!) and this year the perennials are starting to show their combinations. If the rain will ever stop, I'd love to post another wildflower alley update, it has changed even more from that photo! Now doesn't that look better than grass?

Frugal Recycled Seed Starting Trays

The first year I started seeds, I used those fun little jiffy pots. I found, however, that when I was digging up the garden that fall to plant cool weather crops, all of the netting was still around the rootball of my plants. Now, for annuals, this might not be a problem, but then again, I didn’t really want all those little pieces of netting floating around in the soil in my garden. So I started using trays. Well, actually, I started using egg carton tops with drainage holes punched into them. Don’t get me wrong, I love to use the cardboard egg cartons for buying eggs because they biodegrade in my compost pile. But I found that starting seeds in the Styrofoam egg cartons actually helps the soil retain moisture for longer, cuts down on fungus (because they can be washed in hot soapy water to help kill bacteria… hot soapy water tends to destroy the cardboard kind of cartons) and helps give me something to do with all those egg cartons!

So here's how to make your own cheap seed starting trays.

• Take a styrofoam egg carton and cut the top off using scissors.
  
• Wash the egg carton top (that is now separated from the bottom) in hot soapy water. Allow to dry.
  
• Take a knife and make holes in the bottom of your tray for drainage. I find that simply inserting the knife and rotating it 45 degrees to each side gives a nice size hole.
• Fill your tray with sterile potting soil or some other seed starting medium.
• Plant your seeds.
• Place your seed tray on a cookie sheet or some other tray that will hold water so that you can water from the bottom. This will help protect your seedlings from damping off and will also make your watering chores SO much easier.
  
• Congratulate yourself on reusing an egg carton and keeping your garden inexpensive!
  

Recession Garden?

I always perk up a little bit when I see mainstream media covering gardening news. I think in my heart, I still want to fit in on the playground, so it makes me feel better when I see that other folks are also starting to get back into gardening. So when I saw CNN covering the savings that a new gardener can expect from a new plot, I was heartened, and then disheartened. Disheartened because the article mentioned that not all new gardeners are going to save money because they simply don't know what to plant and when and how to do it for the cheapest possible.

So I thought I'd help with that a little. My favorite online places for gardening info and how to tips are rather varied, but there are a few that stand out.

GardenWeb Forums are fabulous for asking questions, searching for other questions, and generally gaining knowledge from a huge community of avid gardeners. It's like having a whole virtual neighborhood of gardeners at your fingertips.

National Gardening Association has tons of how to, getting started, find your zone, figure out what to plant when information. Not just food information either, there's lots of good info for the other parts of your yard here.

Vegetable Gardener is a new favorite for me. Timely posts, lots of how to tips, and all from people who have used all of those techniques in their own yards and gardens.

So are you planting your own Recession Garden this year? (Victory Garden? Vegetable Garden? Kitchen Garden? Just plain Garden?)

Seed Starting Light Set-up

Add one wire shelf, 8 shop lights, 16 fluorescent tubes, a couple of multi-plug extension cords and an inexpensive timer and what do you get? A seed starting set up! I’ve seen shelves like this in garden catalogues and drooled over them, and then cringed at their price (some of them are nearly $300 plus shipping!!). Armed with an idea of what I wanted and a coupon to my favorite home improvement store, I bought the supplies for half the price of the garden catalog variety, and I avoided shipping. I highly recommend having a friend help you set this up, however, as it is no fun to break a light bulb, but lots of fun to work together.
What kinds of bulbs should you use? I thought that a full spectrum bulb would work best, but they're expensive. So I did a little search and found out from the University of Minnesota that plain old shop lights work just as well. I then double checked that information against the wise sages of the Gardener's Forum and found that most folks there say the same thing: don't waste your money on expensive lights for seedlings (now, if you're trying to grow plants throughout the season, that might be a little different). Also, if you notice your seedlings are growing away from one of your bulbs, replace it if you can. You want your little darlings to grow as straight and evenly as possibly. I laugh to my cowboy that he will never have a shortage of lights for his workbench as he’s got all the seed starting leftover bulbs to use.

A Fully Seasoned Day

Today was one of those bizarre weather days in Virginia. It started out 70 and gorgeous with a slight breeze and the smell of spring on the air. I thought it'd be a great day to snap some photos of the tulips coming up under the maple tree. They look like little red stars amidst the slowly greening vinca. We had the windows open, the heat off, just plain enjoying the day when suddenly the temperature dropped, black clouds were in the sky, and it started to rain. So we rushed around closing windows. Then it was about 45 and started to hail. No kidding, hail. Then suddenly cold sunlight and blue sky, so I snapped some more pictures of the tulips (which apparently had the good sense to close back up in the now cold weather, like little tubes of lipstick). Then more rain. Then more sun. Rain. Sun. More hail. Sun. It's like the entire season of spring has played itself out in one day. Just this moment, the sun is shining in the front yard and its raining in the back yard. All day, I've been watching, fascinated at the instantaneous changes in the weather. On days like these, I understand why we call Nature a woman, as if she just can't make up her mind about what she wants to wear.

Tomatoes, Onions, and Marigolds, oh my!

And they’re up! The seeds that we planted at our hen gardening party are finally putting up their little cotyledon leaves (first leaves from a seed). The onions are easy to spot, but the marigolds and tomatoes look exactly the same at this stage (it’s a good thing we marked them well!) This is the point at which we can take off the clear plastic tops of the seedling trays and lower the lights to just above the level of the seedlings (about 3” above the top of the seedlings). This will give them some air flow and will also give them the most light possible from my little shop light set up. The aluminum foil behind the shelves also helps increase the ambient light level for these future garden stars. At this point, I’ll also start petting my plants daily when I check them for moisture. No, I’m not some crazed gardener, petting the seedlings will help them develop strong stalks so that when they make it out into the garden they can withstand the wind and rain. Petting, believe it or not, will help to prevent leggy seedlings. This is also the point at which I’ll start watering with some dilute fish emulsion fertilizer. I like fish emulsion because I can buy it in concentrate and mix my own. I don’t like it because it smells, well, fishy. But it’s organic and gentle enough for my tender little seedlings. Perhaps next year I’ll be ambitious enough to make some compost tea.

Now I’m just waiting for the peppers and the eggplants to come up. I’m not worried because these typically take 2-4 weeks to germinate. Grow little seeds, grow!