Garden report
I just finished this e-mail with a gardening "pen pal" in VT so I thought I'd paste it in here. I'm sort of embarrassed by our feral tomatoes :(
Our tomatoes were a wash too, partially our own fault though as well. It was so hard to get out to the garden during the "rainy season" and since we're both outdoor people, every time it wasn't raining, we were out on our bikes! I planted our seedlings with thin stakes, which worked for a while, but the plants are so unwieldy that they need a cage or something - so a lot of tomatoes were sprawled out on the ground. The flavor of our Brandywines has actually been better than last year, on the few we've picked. Same with the Carbon, but I think we only got one. Haven't tried our plum tomatoes yet; I'm hoping to pick up a bushel tonight for sauce, but even our local farm is scraping to have enough :(
Better luck next year!
Plenty did really well though - our kale is never-ending. I assumed that it would bolt or flower or something, but we keep cutting it and it keeps producing leaves! Our cabbages are Alaska-sized and really delicious. We had a bumper crop of the best garlic you could eat, and we tried out onions this year, which were delicious. We had a great run of peas, and our raspberries are on their second fruiting of the year. Our broccoli ended up weird this year - it wasn't forming heads and we haven't gotten much yield, but what we ate was great. And then our potatoes - well, they keep coming and coming. I am going to dig up the rest of the patch this weekend and get them storing. They are absolutely delicious and I just love digging them up!
It's really nice though, how you learn different things each year - like about tomato cages, and that peas just don't like to be transplanted. And of course it gives you a huge appreciation for farmers, whose livelihood depends on weather luck and on getting the other details right!
Our tomatoes were a wash too, partially our own fault though as well. It was so hard to get out to the garden during the "rainy season" and since we're both outdoor people, every time it wasn't raining, we were out on our bikes! I planted our seedlings with thin stakes, which worked for a while, but the plants are so unwieldy that they need a cage or something - so a lot of tomatoes were sprawled out on the ground. The flavor of our Brandywines has actually been better than last year, on the few we've picked. Same with the Carbon, but I think we only got one. Haven't tried our plum tomatoes yet; I'm hoping to pick up a bushel tonight for sauce, but even our local farm is scraping to have enough :(
Better luck next year!
Plenty did really well though - our kale is never-ending. I assumed that it would bolt or flower or something, but we keep cutting it and it keeps producing leaves! Our cabbages are Alaska-sized and really delicious. We had a bumper crop of the best garlic you could eat, and we tried out onions this year, which were delicious. We had a great run of peas, and our raspberries are on their second fruiting of the year. Our broccoli ended up weird this year - it wasn't forming heads and we haven't gotten much yield, but what we ate was great. And then our potatoes - well, they keep coming and coming. I am going to dig up the rest of the patch this weekend and get them storing. They are absolutely delicious and I just love digging them up!
It's really nice though, how you learn different things each year - like about tomato cages, and that peas just don't like to be transplanted. And of course it gives you a huge appreciation for farmers, whose livelihood depends on weather luck and on getting the other details right!