Blog Archives
Friday PhotoEssay
We got another 1.25 inches of rain last night and this morning. The garden isn’t quite floating away yet, but I’m not going to complain.
The grapevines are budding and blooming. Of course, they waited until now so that there was a better chance of black rot infection! There’s not any disease on the leaves yet though, so maybe they’ll be fine.
The malabar spinach is germinating. The seedlings look so small and innocuous right now, don’t they. If you’ve never seen this plant grow before – well, stay tuned!
The larkspur have really burst into bloom this week. Most of them are that beautiful purple/blue color, but there are a few lavender and pink flowers in there.
Our potatoes and onions in the Family of 4 Garden are looking really healthy. The potatoes almost look too healthy… I don’t know if I’ve ever had potato plants get so big and leggy. Maybe it’s that they are in raised beds, so they seem taller than they really are.
The nasturtiums have been growing pretty quickly now that they are up. We got them planted a little bit too late, so I’m concerned that they won’t hang in long enough to bloom, once it gets hot. In the meantime, I’m going to be looking for some nasturtium recipes…
Have a great weekend! Don’t forget that the Master Gardeners are sponsoring a Garden Tour this weekend. For details, visit our website.
Friday PhotoEssay
We’re back to having a colorful blog, and we’ve got some great pictures to show off!
The butterfly caterpillars have once again eaten the green fennel down to nubbins, and they have begrudgingly moved on to the bronze fennel. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to like the bronze fennel quite as well.
The ‘Sunbelt’ Grapes are beautifully purple/blue and quite tasty. Unfortunately, the grape berry moth larvae think so too!
This Sweet Annie has turned into a huge shrub! This is an herb that I’m not very familiar with, probably because it’s not really a culinary herb, but more of a fragrance herb. Apparently it is supposed to be good for drying and using in herbal wreaths and other such crafty things.
Although we like to keep the basil flowers trimmed back to keep the culinary quality of the basil high, I really love basil flowers! They are really beautiful, the bees like them, and they are just as edible as the leaves.
Now that’s what I like to see in a tomato! This is one of the Rose tomatoes all sliced up and ready for sandwiches. I haven’t been able to get a really good flavor comparison of the Rose and Brandywine tomatoes, but I think Rose wins the productivity and earliness awards.
Have a great Labor Day Weekend!
Friday PhotoEssay
Are you surviving the heat? I’m going to be taking off next week and heading to northern WI and southern MN, where the high temperatures are supposed to be in the 70s! Of course then I’ll be back here the following week and the 90 degree temperatures will feel hot again. I’ll probably post a few things of horticultural interest while I’m off gallivanting…we’ll see what there is to see.
I love growing radishes. They are all about instant gratification! You can’t get much more instantly gratifying for a vegetable gardener than to plant seeds on Tuesday morning and be able to take pictures of the seedlings by Friday morning. We have seedlings growing of the ‘April Cross’ Daikons, the ‘Green Meat’, ‘Red Meat’, and Mantanghong radishes. No sign of beets or carrots growing yet, but if they are going to grow, I would expect to see them coming up in the next several days.
Look what we found hanging out in our pepper plants! Isn’t it cute? I really love hornworms…well, if I find them before they can do major damage. You can really see the little hairs on his back, the suction cups on his abdomen, and his pointy little feet.
Sorry, I just had to indulge in another hornworm picture, especially since you couldn’t see his horn in the other picture.
We have a couple really nice (but still green) Brandywine tomatoes on our plant. I think we have a total of 3 fruit set on our plant…at least that’s all I’ve found so far in our tomato vine jungle.
The ‘Sunbelt’ grape is ripening and hasn’t yet been attacked by robins. From this picture, you can almost pretend that it’s in a huge vineyard, rather than the Demonstration garden!
Don’t those grapes look luscious and delicious?
Have a great weekend!
Friday PhotoEssay
It’s Friday, and that means pictures! Which reminds me…you all should go out and take a couple great tomato pictures to enter in our Tomato Day Photo Contest! Categories are Mr. Tomato Head, The Artistic Tomato, and Unique Tomato Growing Methods. (Maybe we need a category for critters that eat tomatoes?!?)
Speaking of critters eating plants, we have some quite content Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars on our fennel.
Then there’s this ugly guy on the long beans. I’m definitely not thrilled to have him around. It looks like either a corn earworm/tomato fruitworm (very lost, granted), or some sort of cutworm. Either way, he was smushed into the ground after I snapped a good picture!
Our ‘Mars’ seedless grape is starting to ripen. It is always the first of the three grapevines, and usually the most affected by black rot. You can see a shriveled grape that probably had black rot. There were whole clusters that were affected this year. This vine also has more leaf cover, which probably caused the disease to be worse than on the other two vines.
The ‘Orange Blossom’ looks like it will be the first non-cherry or non-early tomato to ripen. I have a picture of this same cluster from Tuesday and they are all green. This morning there are two beginning to turn orange. This isn’t the fully ripe color, but it will be exciting to see what they’re like!
Our Suhyo Cross Cucumbers are starting to take over their territory too. The plants went from being fairly small to covering the whole section of the garden in just a couple weeks! The cucumbers aren’t quite ready to pick yet, but they should be by sometime next week.
Have a great weekend!
Pruning Grapevines
The weather was just too nice yesterday to stay inside. I had to get out and do something. That something turned out to be pruning the grapes. (The Master Gardeners didn’t come yesterday, since we were all on a “Buy Local” tour of a couple of our local nurseries – Hillside and Hongs.) Normally, this would be a little late for pruning, but they haven’t started to leaf out yet. I’m sure they’ll come on fast with the warm weather this week. (Dare I call it hot weather?)
The vines grew quite aggressively last year, so there was a lot to prune. Pruning grapes can be a little scary, even for me, so I had Bob, our other Hort Agent, come help with the pruning.
Bob went right to town on those grapes. First we worked on training the young vine. Then “snip, snip, snip!” He really made quick work of the rest of the vines.
Can you see the difference? The vines look positively bare at this point. Bob pruned almost all the growth from last year off, leaving little shoots with 1 bud for regrowth of vegetative vines and slightly bigger shoots with 3 buds for fruiting vines.
