Blight

So, the first time I tried to grow a tomato was when I lived in Meridian, Idaho.  I tried to grow it in a bucket.  I have no idea what variety I picked, but I suspect it was not a great container choice.  Furthermore, being Oregon born and bred, where rain is plentiful and temperatures are relatively mild, I didn't realize just how much water that little Idahoan tomato needed.  It turned out like this:

Picture this, only more dead.

I didn't try to grow any vegetables for many a year after that, but in the mean time I became very good at killing house plant.

Anyway, later on, as mentioned in a previous post, I attempted to grow another tomato plant.  This time I lived in Western Washington.  Several things went wrong here.  One of them was my determination not to let this new tomato die of thirst.  There was also the soil depth issue, lack of sun, my failure to realize that tomatoes don't like wet leaves...  and this is what happened:

Early blight.  My nemesis.  My greatest fear.  I hope never to see this tragic fungal stain on my vegetables ever again.

I'm doing what I can to avoid early blight this time around.  But I am simultaneously fearful of another offender:

Late blight.  I only learned of late blight this year.  Probably because none of my tomato plants ever made it to "late."  In my opinion, late blight would be far worse, simply because all your hard labor would amount to nothing.  At least with early blight you haven't slaved away all summer waiting for delicious fruits.  I shall have to conduct further research to learn how best to avoid this bad boy.  So far, I have found this link to be quite informative:  How to prevent late blight: organic gardening

The end.

Good Morning!

We received some unexpected rain last night.  Well I didn't expect it at least.  Maybe the weather report said something and I forgot.  Or maybe they predicted wrong, which is what happens fifty percent of the time.  Fifty-ish anyway.

I was a little concerned about Scruffy (my Sun Gold tomato plant) because the canopy was disassembled.  I noticed that water had pooled on the roof of his happy little cloche, and I happen to know that the roof is not totally sealed against water.  Here is what I mean: the two pieces of plastic that make up the roof are overlapping each other, but the seam is not sealed.  Hence my concern.  The idea of Scruffy having water poured all over his delicate, water-loathing leaves made me sad for him.  (That's what I get for naming a plant.)

However, when I dashed outside to dump out the water, I noticed that the soil and scruffy were unaffected by the puddle!  Hooray for Scruffy!  I do still need to make his cloche a little more airtight on top if I plan on leaving the canopy down.  Which I am now considering, since Scruffy seems to be pretty well protected under there.  My first choice would be duct tape, but I am fresh out.  I'm thinking I will just cover the cloche with the plastic sheet of the canopy when it rains until I am able to acquire some mega-tape.

Scruffy's house.  I snapped this photo from the comfort of my warm, soft, indoorishly-situated chair.  Also, the glass is covered in the children's fingerprints.  Mostly toddler prints, considering their location and size.  I should probably clean the window.  But their handprints are so dang cute!  I mean really! 

As you can see, I decided to be impatient (which is my usual modus operandi) and fill my dresser drawer with dirt from the kids' digging spot.  Not half as ideal as potting soil, but honestly, from what I hear about mint, it's practically a weed and will grow anywhere.  So I will give it a little miracle grow after it becomes established with true leaves and what forth, and then it will probably explode and destroy us all.  I decided to situate it next to the window so that I can observe the carnage from the comfort of my chair.

Minty dresser from the other end.  The cute end.  Look, drawer pulls and everything!  I hope they don't rust and become less cute.

In other news, I'm pleased to announce that Climby (my sugar pea garden) is starting to wrap her little grabby things around the trellis!  Look how cute she is, hangin' on for dear life, preparing to climb the strings the way a diver climbs a ladder for fear of shark attack...

Hooray for Climby!  Get away from the rare but deadly dirt shark!  Also, how does she do that?  Amazing.

And my big announcement for the day: little green bean sprouts are beginning to make an appearance!  Within their appropriate germination date and everything.  Last time I tried to plant green beans, they took twice as long to germinate as the package said.  At the time I didn't realize that late germination means stunted growth and crappy production.  Which explains why my green beans were stunted and crappy.  So I'm hoping this bodes well for the little guys.  And I guess I need to name the green bean clan.  Desmond they shall be!

Go Desmond!  Do the thing!

The end.

Whoosh!

It is super windy today!  So windy, in fact, that I had to take down the plastic of the tomato canopy.  The wind was on the verge of shredding it, and I didn't want it to fly off and damage something.  Or blow into the neighbor's yard.  Yep, pretty sure he wouldn't be all that thrilled about a huge plastic sheet tumbling around back there.

What the canopy looked like before.  Now it is just tomato stakes.

I was a tad concerned that the cloche might blow away as well, but so far it is holding its own.  Being a nice, sunny day (though cold), I'm unclear on whether or not I am supposed to leave the cloche on, or whether or not it should be vented.  On the other hand, if I prop up the cloche to vent it, would the wind just tear it off and thus damage Scruffy?  (My tomato plant.  Yes, I named it.)  Well, seeing as how it is both windy and cool, and the fact that I did cut a hole in the side to keep tabs on Scruffy's state of health, I decided to let it be.  I may have to water him today.  We shall see what the day brings.  So far, Scruffy is pretty happy in his cozy little home.

This photo of Scruffy brought to you by a hole in the side of his cloche.

If you're wondering why there is a juice bottle inside Scruffy's home, there was a cold, wet day recently, so I filled it with warm water and stuck it under the cloche as a little heater for Scruffy.  What a spoiled tomato plant he is!

I decided to go ahead and show how the rest of my garden is doing.  Also, it seems fitting to name the other plants as well, just to be fair.  Here is one of the two totes where the radishes are hanging out.  I'd name the radishes individually, but seeing as how there are so many of them, and the fact that they have such short lives, I decided to name them as a unit.  They shall be known as McCrunchy.

McCrunchy, getting bigger and bigger.  Look, that one is starting to get true leaves!  *points*  Also, something is reflecting some heart-shaped light on the side of the tote.  I guess the reflection source must really love radishes!  I sure do... oh wait, I am the reflection source!  I was right!

Here is the slightly enlarged corner of the flower bed.  To the right you see oregano (his name is Burt), which is growing like mad, as always.  Very happy and self maintaining.  Behind that colorless chicken figurine is a bunch of sage (her name is Musty), which is also growing like crazy and low maintenance.  She has quadrupled in size already, and it's not even May.  I fear she may take over the garden...  So far Burt is behaving pretty well though.  I've been growing him for three years, and he always stays in that little clump, making him easy to prune when necessary.  Oh hey, look!  My daughter's legs are photobombing!

I'm not sure where to put all those chickens...  Oh wait, I know!  The garden!

Don't you love how overgrown our lawn is?  That's Hubby's department.  He can do what he wants as far as I'm concerned.

Eventually (hopefully this year) I am going to fill that wooden box (above) with more soil and plant some wildflowers in it.  It's actually two pieces of a dresser drawer smooshed together.  I have an intact dresser drawer that I intend to plant mint in this year.  I want mint iced tea!

Moving on to other things, the peas are named Climby.  Once again, there are too many to name individually.  So far, they seem to be pretty happy.  I had a couple of run-ins with what I interpreted as wire worms, so I set a bunch of carrot traps.  They haven't caught anything yet, and it's been over a week.  Considering the fact that the peas are still growing, I'm hoping that's a sign that I really didn't have a whole lot of them, and hopefully they won't make a nuisance of themselves if they are there.

A portion of Climby.  She is happy.

And of course, I can't forget the zucchini, which is just now coming up.  I planted them in a soil bag.  I'm thinking one bag will only accommodate one plant, so I will be thinning these later.  And the one who remains shall be named Squishy.

Squishy in a bag!

The end.

Here we go...

...My first entry! I feel like I'm supposed to introduce myself and say something profound. Yeah, the last part of that is most likely not going to happen. However, I can at least accomplish the former by saying that my name is Josie, I'm a wife of thirteen years (totally awesome!), a mom of two, and a homeschool teacher.

Well, what I didn't realize--and yes, perhaps I should have purchased "Gardening for Dummies" and done some research--was that the veggies I planted needed more heat, less water, and far more soil depth than my partly shady yard, wet climate, and pathetically shallow swimming pool had to offer.  Now, I think some swimming pools would have worked just fine, but I cheaped out and bought the toddler pool.  Which was barely ten inches deep.  If that.  Also, the websites advised putting the drainage holes on the sides of the pool.  Which might be okay for the larger pools.  But my dinky pool ended up being a total swamp.  All my plants died of what I can only assume was root rot.  I know the tomato had blight.  The squash... well, it was just stunted and feeble.

My swimming pool garden.  It was declared an endangered wetland.  Also, it was way overcrowded!

That was a sorely disappointing year, I dare say.  But it definitely taught me something.  Well, lots of things.  The most important thing it taught me, though, was that you really shouldn't underestimate the Pacific Northwest's harshly drenched environment.  I live in Western Washington.  Yes, we have beautiful trees.  But some things have proved themselves to be quite challenging to grow here because of the short season, the abundance of rain, and the cool to moderately warm temperatures.

The other thing it taught me was that soil depth is important.  Especially for tomatoes.

Moving on.

Two years ago, after having moved into a house that had a real patio and a real flower bed--not fake flower beds that turn out to be the receptacles of rain gutter runoff, or those pretend patios that end up actually being a three square foot slab of multi-fissured concrete--I decided to once more try my hand at planting.  Although my ego had suffered a solid blow, I refused to give up.  I wanted fresh garden veggies, dangit!  I sowed cauliflower, sugar snap peas, green beans, and parsnips in the flower bed, and in my one tote full of dirt, I planted carrots.  There were also some herbs in there somewhere.

This time, I was moderately successful!  The peas did fantastic.  The carrots, although tiny (I have since drawn the conclusion that they were improperly spaced), were sweet and flavorful.  The parsnips were a complete and total failure, as was the cauliflower (the cauliflower grew awesomely, but the heads wouldn't mature).  The green beans were nearly as sad, but we did get a few bunches.

Parts of my 2011 garden, at the end of the year.  The cilantro and spinach had bolted early on.  
That's what the scraggly looking sticks sprouting out of the neon planters are.

I felt pretty good about that garden.  It was a marked improvement on my first attempt.  And it showed me that, whatever might be said about tomatoes and squash, peas seemed to enjoy our climate quite well.  And I don't think carrots mind it all that much either.

Last year we were broke, so I ended up just sowing a bunch of cheap flowers, which were fun because they were no maintenance.  My daughter was one that year, so planting vegetables probably would have ended in disaster anyway.  She is a tenacious flower picker.  It's far less devastating to lose a flower than it is to lose a vegetable producer.  Anyway, that year I added a second tote of dirt for planting.

A picture of one of the flowers I grew in 2012.

This year I ended up with some extra money due to some crochet projects that I sold.  So I bought several bags of soil, added a third tote, and then converted an old broken dresser into a raised plant bed.

Against most people's better judgement, I have decided to try a tomato again.  So I built a clear plastic canopy over the dresser using tomato stakes, to regulate the soil's moisture level.  I was told by a landscaper/plant genius friend that I could plant the tomato on its side to give the roots more room to grow, since it is a raised bed.  So I did that.  I planted the tomato yesterday.  I couldn't find the variety that I wanted, so I went with a cherry tomato called... Sun Gold, I think.  Later I might try to add another tomato plant, hopefully a slicer.  But I want to wait and see how things go with Tomato Number One, whom I shall refer to as Scruffy from this point forward.

The dresser that eventually became Scruffy's home.  Also totes.

We're experiencing cool temps, wind, and rain at the moment.  So I threw together a makeshift cloche for Scruffy out of an old hamper frame and some bubble wrap and garbage bags.  I watered him with warmish water and then covered him.  I hope that was the right thing to do, but honestly, I'm pretty much just wingin' it here.

I planted Sugar Snap Peas again.  I planted about four times as many as I did last time, since the original six plants that I grew just didn't produce enough to satisfy our sugar pea appetite.  Hopefully they will all turn out as well as they did the first time around.  I'm also trying bush beans again.  They aren't enjoying these cool temps much, so I may have to redo them.

My two totes are growing radishes.  We (my son Miles and I) planted them in neat, tidy, happy little rows in just one of the totes, and then my daughter (I fondly refer to her as Hurricane Nora), went and played gloopygoo hands in the totes.  By some miracle, they still came up.  Not in tidy rows anymore though!  And they are growing in both totes!  Ah, toddlers...

My third tote was converted to a fairy garden for Hurricane Nora to play in.  I meant for it to be a diversion from the <i>real</i> garden, but she seems to be more interested in the peas than anything else.  I'm hoping against hope she doesn't one day bring me a bouquet of them.  (I do enjoy her dandelion bouquets though!)

I decided to sow some zucchini seeds directly into a bag of Miracle Grow soil.  I'd heard of people planting straight into the bags, or planting things in garbage bags.  So I'm giving it a try.  One little seedling has come up.  He's cozily nestled under a plastic cup right now, to cut down on wind and temp abuse.

I also have flowers.

The end.