Cutting my loses

Yesterday I reduced my tomato crop by 1/4 (I only have 8 plants so I took 2 out.)  They hadn't produced any fruit yet (not even the green kind.)  I figured they couldn't produce fruit in what remains of the season and were only sucking up precious resources from the containers they were planted in.  Hopefully the existing green tomatoes will ripen soon.

Today I hope to thin out my squashes for the same reason -- better to get some crop with fewer than no crop with many. 

My garden has been largely overlooked lately.  It has lost the fight against young kids, camps, camping, and houseguests.  But as little as I have been able to put into it (or harvest from it), it still offers some great rewards.  Like whenever I look out my kitchen window and "catch" the kids snacking on strawberries.  Although I got very ambitious about my garden for a bit and later disheartened that I didn't come close to reaching my vision, getting to watch my kids forage is a pretty great reward in itself.

Making sad tomatoes happy again

It has been a tough few weeks in my garden.  Mostly I haven't found a lot of time to be there.  It's funny how gardening has become like exercise -- you forget how much you enjoy it until get a chance to do it again....

Lately my garden has me worried because everything seems to be growing behind schedule (and what else can you expect in a cool summer.)  I was particularly worried about my tomatoes above.  I thought they caugh tomato blight because the leaves were drooping and yellowing.  I started removing damaged leaves and contacted the hotline at Seattle Tilth for confirmation.  They surprised me by writing back that they thought it might be an iron deficiency due to an inability to take up water.  (The darkened veins and the yellowing from the edge inward led to the diagnosis.)  Well, it sounds like a more optimistic prognosis to me!

So today I finally got back into the garden.  As they recommended, I added an inch of compost to my pot (mushroom compost was what I had handy.)  I sprayed the leaves with kelp water to fertilize.  And I added coffee to the soil.  Seattle Tilth recommended adding coffee grounds -- but all I had was some unused, unwanted ground coffee.  Hopefully, the plants will make a great turn around and I will see no more yellow leaves while the fruit ripens.

Good bugs

And thank goodness, because I left these two alone....  These soldier beetles eat soft-bodied insects including aphids, catapillars, and slugs -- all known to frequent my garden.  I am glad to see some soldier beetles consider my raised bed home.

Wet and dry gardening

I have been harvesting cabbage since my return -- and it finally dawned on me that I was seeing something pretty special.  I bought a six-pack of cabbage starts at Seattle Tilth's spring sale.  The ones that didn't fit in my raised bed I added to my ornamental bed in the front yard.

The difference between my raised bed and my ornamental bed is water.  The ornamentals get none -- I designed it to be drought tolerant and haven't watered it since the first year it was planted.  The difference between the cabbages is visually clear.  The well-watered raised bed cabbage is smooth.

The un-watered ornamental bed cabbage is heavily "savoyed." 

If you click the savoyed cabbage image to get the larger one, you can see why.  The wrinkles and crinkles catch water and hold it (sometimes all day.)  The watered cabbage doesn't need wrinkles because it gets what it needs from the soil.