A look at the garden

I haven't posted in so long and I'm not sure if I've even posted pictures of the garden yet before. Figured I would bring the blog back to life with some... life :). We've had a pretty good harvest so far and even though we lost the grass a lot of the other plants are doing well! Let's see here...

All photos taken with my iPhone4.

I threw a lot of old vegetables into one of the potters and the potatoes ended up growing. The plant itself wasn't very pretty and it had started dying. It was a lot of fun digging them up and this is what we found!

There are a couple banana peppers, a green bell pepper, and also some sort of tomato from the garden in the colander as well. The skin on the potatoes seems much thinner than from the store, and the meat is much smoother when cooked than store bought. Granted they did grow from a store bought potato, I still believe they are much better.

Now onto the plants...

Here are some strawberries, parsley, cilantro, and basil in this strawberry planter. We decided to place it in the larger 2x6 decking planter/bench.

A planter within a planter, redundant, I know! But I think it is a nice look.

A broader look, behind the strawberry planter is a watermelon vine. To the right are 3 tomato plants: heirloom yellow, yellow pear, and either a celebrity or early girl tomato, I forgot which.

The watermelon vine. The bulk of the planter is compost, which was too strong for the plants and I believe "burned" them essentially. A few held on and out of nowhere this watermelon started growing like crazy.

Yellow pear tomato on the left, heirloom yellow on the right.

The tomato plants are supported by a T-shape trellis that we experimented with. I think this is a nice design to support several plants, while keeping the plants at the forefront and the trellis more or less hidden.

The heirloom tomato appeared to die once transplanted into this compost rich soil. It then sprouted leaves, and then a lot of blooms, but unfortunately it is suffering 100% bloom drop, most likely due to an excess of nitrogen. :(

I trim the dead leaves and the dead blooms off. They crack or turn yellow at the last knuckle so I sometimes put them out of their misery before they get to fall off. I'm not sure what to do with this one, perhaps transplant it again? Seems that I will not get any harvest with it this way.

A close-up of some yellow pear tomatoes:

Here are some celebrity tomatoes growing in planters on the ground. We built these small planters to hide the base of the fence posts, which are metal and concrete. This plant is doing alright, the concrete happened to take up a lot of the space and this guy really had to work its roots to find soil!

Here is a celebrity tomato again, planted at the same time as the previous. There was hardly any concrete post blocking this one, look at the difference!

This is IMHO the perfect tomato plant - in terms of foliage to fruit ratio. I tend to grow tomatoes with more leaves than tomatoes, but not this time!

Here is a grape plant that was planted also at the base of a fence post. Grape plants are far more fragile than many other fruit bearing plants. It appeared to be dieing for many months. The existing leaves have all fallen off but all of the vines have a nice clump of growth at the end :). I have hope in this one!

Now here is a cluster of early girl tomatoes. These were planted a bit too close together - 3 plants in this small space. They grew pretty well though but I think there is far more foliage than fruits. These were set in a higher planter and now they tower well over us. We put a trellis in the planter itself, then placed some boards across the fence when those were not high enough.

I think with more time and space, this could turn into a tomato roof! I need a lot of shade due to my polymorphous light eruptions (PMLE) so this may be a new way to grow tomato plants :).

These are pepper plants which are growing in the same planter. The 2 on the left are green bell peppers and the 2 to the right are yellow banana.

Here is a lovely Japanese heirloom eggplant. The leaves are delicate, velvety green and purple. This plant is surprisingly easy to grow and fruitful!

Close-up:

Here are 2 more tomatoes, I believe celebrity's, that are growing in a pine potter in the front yard. This has the same style box trellis, just larger to support both.

These tomatoes had grown quite a bit before we added the trellis. We damaged a few of the stalks - tomatoes are extremely hardy and as long as the stems have a connection to the main stem, they will continue to get enough nutrients. I used some medical silk tape to keep this one together, as you can see the tomatoes are growing just fine.

I have more gardening pictures but will have to save those for another blog. We are blessed to be in San Diego and our growing season is quite long. I've had tomatoes survive a season, the whole year, and then fruit the next summer. I have some other herbs, fruits, and vegetables that I am going to plant and see how far I can keep harvesting.

Til next time :)