My 2018/19 veggie garden

[IrishLass]

Day 58! I found a baby strawberry this morning hiding amongst the leaves! I though the flower above was the first bloom, but apparently not!:

My Happy Rich Broccoli has some flowerettes growing, too! Up till now, we've been harvesting its leaves for smoothies, but now we can harvest its flowerettes, too:

I got inside the leaves and took some close up pics of some of my tomatoes this morning. Here are my Black Cherry tomatoes:

My Principe Borghese:

More to come in the next post...............

 

[IrishLass]

Some of my Ceylon tomatoes (mini-beefsteaks):

And a mix of Earliana and Fruit Punch tomatoes. They have intertwined themselves with each other:

I am sooooooooo looking forward to when they all ripen!


IrishLass

 

[Lin19687]

I would love to have Broccoli but it didn't work out this year. Tried the little broccli ones too, forgot the name though.
Those are great pics !

 

[IrishLass]

Day 66! Finally have some tomato ripening going on! This is one is a Black Cherry mater. So far it's the first to show color:

 

[IrishLass]

Day 85! These are my pickings from this morning:

I'm finding it hard to believe I'm still getting cucumbers off that vine. Most of the leaves are drying/dying off, but just when I think I've finally cut the last cuke off of it, I find more new ones growing. I'm not complaining, though! lol

The tomatoes are doing great. I've been able to keep them all trimmed and managed, and the multitude of fruits are all in various stages of ripening. The ones pictured in the bowl are Ceylon's, Black Cherries and Heidi's, and they are all scrumptious! My favorite snack is a bowl of them sliced with a light sprinkling of kosher salt. Yum!


IrishLass

 

[SaltedFig]

Beautiful!

(Those basil leaves are huge!)

 

[Relle]

Lovely bowl of fresh veg. the one and only tomato I have picked was a yellow tom thumb, it was sweet. I think the plant is slowly producing fruit.

 

[nonna oakie]

My husband can not grow tomatoes. He gets so mad the guys around here get beautiful gardens and only thing he got was sweet potatoes. ha-ha

 

[IrishLass]

(Those basil leaves are huge!)

I know, right?! It's not unusual to find leaves of certain plants on the Tower that have grown to be as big as my head! This particular basil plant had had enough and decided to fight for some breathing room due to the tomatoes blocking it too much from the sun..... and quite a fighter it is! I noticed the other day that it had aggressively pushed through past the curtain of mater plants shading it to pop out into the full light of day. I think I could even almost hear it shout, "Get outta my way, you dang maters!" lol

Lovely bowl of fresh veg. the one and only tomato I have picked was a yellow tom thumb, it was sweet. I think the plant is slowly producing fruit.

Just had a look-see at Tom Thumbs online.....are they the same as Tumbling Toms?

My husband can not grow tomatoes. He gets so mad the guys around here get beautiful gardens and only thing he got was sweet potatoes. ha-ha

I can empathize with his frustration! At various times throughout the years I've tried to grow tomatoes in large containers filled with composted soil from the garden center, but to no lasting avail....they would grow nicely at the beginning, reach the baby stages of fruiting, and then die before the fruit could reach maturation in the full force of our brutal summer heat. It wasn't until I started growing them hydroponically in the Tower that I was finally able to achieve success.... that, and also to come to a clearer understanding of their growth habits in our particular climate..... and veggie gardening in general thanks to YouTube videos (an awesome resource that had not been invented yet back then!). There was so much I didn't know about or understand then, but I'm learning!

I think my main problem back in my days of tomato failure was growing them at the wrong time in our climate. It turns out that a late summer planting is so much better for them here than an early spring planting like the rest of the US. Knowing what I know now, I think I would have much better success growing them in dirt than I ever did in the past.


IrishLass

 

[IrishLass]

Day 96 Pickings (aka, Dec 26, 2018)

Day 104 (today January 3, 2019): It's been very cold here lately, with temps going below freezing (30F/-1C) almost every night this past week, so I've had to cover the Tower with its protective solar blanket every night to protect my 'babies'. There was frost everywhere this morning when I got up, but none touched my tower or my orange trees:

I take it off in the morning once all frost danger has passed. The daytimes temps have been reaching into the high 40'sF - mid 50'sF (8C to 12C) all this past week. Tomorrow it's supposed to reach a sweltering high of 64F/17C! lol

Here she is with the frost blanket off this morning:

Everything is doing great except for the cucumber plant. It's mostly dead, but yet still alive with 2 live/growing cukes left hanging on for dear life or just for spite, it seems. lol The most recent cuke I picked was on the day after Christmas, and it was a huge one. You can see it peeking out under the maters in my first pic above.

I picked a 5-gallon bucket full of oranges yesterday meaning to juice them, but ran out of time. I'll be juicing them today. From the looks of it, it doesn't look like I made any dent at all to the abundance of oranges on the tree. lol There's also another orange tree on the other side of the yard, not pictured. So far, they both are holding up great in the nightly freezing cold weather without being covered. Hubby watered them deeply the other day which helps tremendously, and we also have been placing an incandescent 75-watt light bulb underneath each one and leaving it on for the night. So far, so good!


IrishLass