Tomatoes are still hanging in there with lots of green tomatoes. About every other day, I get one or two with a blush that I pick and wrap in newspaper to ripen.
Hope all your gardens are doing well for the current season. Have a great weekend. God Bless.
Pinging the list.
North Idaho - garden all prepped and ready for winter with manure and organic clippings.
No snow yet....should be some in the higher mountains this weekend. Mountain pass traveling in the Cascades and Idaho/Montana line could be dicey. Possible rain/snow mix in vallys. Highs in 40’s next week.
Cocoa and seed catalogs by the fireplace....
Peppers are just about done changing colors...orange, purple, red, and chocolate bells looking good in Red Hampshire...mustard habaneros ready to be processed for hot sauce.
Thank you for taking over the gardening thread, Greeneyes! Things have been busy with trying to start a new business. Half the time I don’t even know what day it is.
I did manage to get the potatoes harvested this week. It’s been interesting to compare the two varieties. I had ordered a fingerling potato after carefully comparing descriptions, but for some reason no matter how many times I said I’d ordered them, my dad had it in his head that I expected him to buy me seed potatoes. He does that sometimes, he gets so convinced he knows what you mean, that he doesn’t actually hear what you say.
Anyway, he brought a nameless variety of red potato, so I planted both. The fingerlings had long vines that I couldn’t seem to keep hilled. The reds had kind of short, stubby vines. The reds died down at the first hint of cold weather, but the fingerlings took several freezes before the vines died down. The reds produced about enough to replace their own seed potatoes. The fingerlings produced about 4X what was planted, although some of them are kind of funky-looking, with multiple arms and legs.
Both survived the drought, but I think I’ll only plant the fingerlings next year.
My tomatoes didn’t make it through the drought, but the farmers markets are full of them, so I’ve been canning up spaghetti sauce.
Picked a bucket of fresh limes today. That was about twice the amount we got all last year. Garden veggies are doing OK, but still waiting for some to come up.
Hi from SE PA! My first gardening post. I grew tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash and cukes, red onions, garlic and a 2nd year fig tree.
Tomato leaves got black spot and leaves all fell off. The early fruit was fine, but short season and not as many tomatoes as I would have expected (not enough to make much sauce).
Peppers grew well, but didn’t get very large.
Zucchini, squash and cuke leaves got a white mildew and some veges had, I think, blossom end rot.
Red onions and garlic bulbs didn’t get very big, so I left them in the ground.
I had my soil tested and amended; good watering and plenty of sun in raised beds; the only think I can think of is that they were planted too close together.
Now on to the fig tree. It’s a brown turkey fig and I’ve protected it from our one night of frost. It has quite a few figs, they are all very green and hard, and I think they are supposed to be picked when soft.
Anybody have any fig ripening suggestions? Should I pick them before it gets frosty?
Thanks for the ping GE. As I reported in the last thread I got my Garlic planted, mulched and covered to keep the skunks from digging up the sets. Picked the last of the salad cukes today and all of the pumpkins. We are in full time cleanup mode here on the shores of Humboldt Bay. I’ll post some photos later...
I spot-checked the apricot seeds I put in the fridge back on August 1st. The seeds came from the fruit we picked from a “city tree” in the greenway along the river.
They’re starting to sprout; some have about 1/2” of root. I’ll need to pot them soon, then figure out where I’ll keep them until they can be planted next spring.
(Clean; dry a few days; soak overnight; put in damp potting soil & seal into a Ziplock; put in a veggie drawer of the fridge for 2-3 months.)
Apricots are supposed to be the least variable of major fruits to grow from seed. The tree they came from is about 20-25’ high, and is never pruned, sprayed or fertilized, so the fruit isn’t the best I’ve ever picked, but it is a lot better than the greenish golf balls that show up in our markets for $3/pound. They also made very good jam and syrup.
We’ve gotten some snow flurries, and rain showers this month...so far a total of 0.03” of moisture! Yep; three hundredths of an inch.