Blog Archives
Garden Plans for 2012: Tomato Garden
I would say that of all the gardens we have planned for this year, the Tomato Garden is the most standard. We’re not doing anything too crazy this year, in large part because we wanted to choose varieties that we thought would be successful even if we get them planted late. We also are re-trying a number of varieties from last year that just didn’t have a chance to really show what they can do.
Since this raised bed is 32 feet long (8 feet longer than we have been used to), we realized that we didn’t have enough tomato cages to really make good use of that space. Hence the design you see above. We are planting half of the garden with tomato cages for support and the other half using the Florida Weave (aka Stake & Weave) system. We have chosen 8 tomato varieties, and we will plant one plant of each in both halves of the garden. This will give us the chance to really see the difference in how the plants are managed in the two systems. I don’t expect to see any yield or fruit quality differences, but it might show the pros and cons of using both systems with indeterminate and determinate tomatoes.
We tried to select varieties that are 75 days or less to maturity after transplanting, although we fudged a bit on a couple of them.
‘Valley Girl’ is a early tomato producing medium sized tomatoes that is supposed to set fruit under both heat and cold stress.
‘Country Taste’is an indeterminate hybrid “heirloom type” tomato that we tried last year with little luck. It’s supposed to be a larger tomato with great flavor.
‘Bellstar’is a determinate paste tomato that is early producing with high yields.
‘Martha Washington’ is a brand new hybrid “heirloom type” that boasts wider adaptability and productivity with an heirloom flavor. A little bit later producing.
The 4 heat set varieties, ‘BHN-189,’ ‘Solar Fire,’ ‘Super Sioux,’ and ‘SunMaster’ we grew last year, but we wanted to give them a better chance this year, hopefully planting them a little earlier and closer to “regular” tomato planting time. Of course, we’re also hoping for a summer that is less crazy hot!
Garden Plans for 2012: New & Unique Vegetables
Despite the totally muddy state of disrepair that the garden is displaying right now and despite the lingering memories of last summer, we are forging ahead with our plans for the garden this year!
One of the themed gardens we are planning for this year is New and Unique Vegetables. Of courses, this is right up my alley!
This is a smaller bed, at slightly less than 12 feet long, with our typical 4 feet wide. Because we aren’t quite sure when we’ll be able to plant, we have plans for regular May planting, with a long list of options if something goes wrong and we can’t plant until July or August. (If we get to that point, I’ll share those ideas with you. Assuming you are still reading this blog when all I have to say is along the lines of, “Gee, maybe we’ll plant something sometime maybe.”)
But we are still positive and hopeful that we will be able to plant by sometime in May to early June. Just like we’re hopeful that this coming summer won’t be so terribly hot.
Anyway, let’s talk a little bit about what’s in this garden.
There are two types of zucchini – one is yellow and the other green. The fun part about these squash is that they both are striped squash. So while the plants aren’t crazy out there, the zucchinis themselves should be interesting.
Then there are the 2 eggplant. Even I can’t avoid eggplant every year. We managed to have ZERO eggplants in the garden last year, so I guess it is okay to have a couple this year. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I did eat a quite good eggplant dish at one of the local Indian restaurants last weekend. Anything is edible with enough spices…!) One of the eggplants is a white variety that produces small, egg-sized fruit. ‘Prosperosa’ is an Italian eggplant that is not the full dark purple, and instead of being an oblong, teardrop shape is much more rounded with slight ruffling near the stem.
Two tomatoes – although technically only one is a tomato. ‘Indigo Rose’ is the new purple tomato that is a very dark purple with an orange/red interior. The skin is supposed to get darker with more exposure to sun. The second “tomato,” the Litchi Tomato is technically not a tomato at all, although it is a cousin. The plant itself looks more like an eggplant, and the fruit are the size of cherry tomatoes with caps kind of like tomatillos. It is very sweet in flavor, but the plant protects its fruit well with prickles on the caps, stems, and leaves.
We are going to continue to make good use of our cattle panel trellises throughout the garden, and on this trellis we are growing one melon and one squash. The melon, ‘Lambkin,’ is a type of melon called “Piel de Sapo” or “skin of the frog.” Sounds appetizing, right? Actually, I had one of these melons at a farmers market in Rochester, MN a couple summers ago, and it was incredibly sweet with an interesting floral flavor. I’m excited for us to grow it here! The squash we had originally selected was a tricolor acorn squash, but we are already on plan B for that one…tentatively we are going to try ‘Fairy’ Squash, which is a 2 1/2 lb. winter squash that doesn’t seem to readily fit into any of the normal winter squash categories.
So those are some of the different things we’re trying this year…are you trying anything new or unique in your garden this year?
Friday PhotoEssay: A Look Back at 2009
Last week I finally finished uploading all of the 2009 Demo Garden photos to Flickr. I have to say…the vibe from those pictures is much different than you get from looking at a lot of the 2011 pictures! I thought I would share some of my favorite pictures from that year, since I got to enjoy them again as I was uploading them. To see all the 2009 pictures, click here.
We overwintered this radicchio from 2008, and this is what it looked like just after Valentine’s Day in 2009! Still one of my all-time favorite Demo Garden pictures.
I think all of the radishes we planted in 2009 were Easter Egg Mix Radishes. At least, all the pictures I took were of them.
2009 was the year of the cherry tomato! We had them coming out our ears. This bowl was one of the first harvests in early July.
This was the year we had a full bed of zinnias. The flowers were extremely photogenic, even if the rest of the plants weren’t particularly beautiful.
We got lots of rain in 2009, and the garden was lush and full of insects. This big grasshopper was one of my favorites, but there are lots of pictures of spiders, grasshoppers, butterflies, and other bugs in the archive.
Fall 2009 was the season of beautiful Bok Choy. And rain, as you can see. I think that was the season that our Bok Choy looked its absolute best. The weather was perfect with no insects and no bolting.
Since 2009 was the year before our raspberries succumbed to Phytophthora Root/Crow Rot, the berries were large, luscious, and still ripening in November!
Doesn’t looking back at some pictures of a really good gardening year make you a little more excited for this year?
Have a great weekend!
2012 Goals, Plans, & Resolutions
It seems like most of the garden blogs I read have been doing some type of New Year’s Resolutions, and so I’m going to jump on the bandwagon a few days late. This is a mixture of goals and plans for the blog and the garden. (The garden goals are going to be very general, since we aren’t having our first planning meeting until Jan. 17th!)
1. Have raised beds to plant in – hopefully early enough in the season to be reasonable!
2. Post more vegetable and herb recipes on the blog again. Last year I got away from posting many recipes (probably because there weren’t a lot of vegetables for a chunk of the summer). I’m planning to feature more yummy veggie recipes on the blog.
3. Grow some good tomatoes. Okay, this is probably more dependent on the weather than anything I can do.
4. Do a better job of staying on top of insect and disease problems as they occur – both for blogging purposes and enacting solutions.
5. Do more vertical gardening. We had a pretty successful year with the trellises, and I hope we’re going to try some new things again this year.
6. Think about water conservation – and maybe do something about it too. While conditions aren’t as dry as they were in the fall, we are still in a drought without many signs of it letting up. As we get a new irrigation system in place, I hope we can make it as efficient as possible. Many vegetables have a better flavor with a little bit of deficit irrigation (getting a bit less water than they strictly need), so maybe we can practice a bit more tough love.
7. Get a rain barrel. We’ve been talking about getting a rain barrel put in the Quiet Garden area, and maybe we’ll get that done as part of the renovation. We wouldn’t be using it for the vegetables, but it could be used for flowers and containers.
8. Explore Italian vegetables. Maybe this will happen this year or maybe next year. I have been salivating over the new Seeds from Italy catalog, and dreaming up ways to make fennel, radicchio, cardoon, and other fun things grow in Kansas.
What are you garden plans for the new year?
Holiday Tomatoes?
Erica commented on the previous post with a link to a Star Tribune article about the potential for growing container tomatoes as Christmas decorations! Here’s the article for your reading pleasure.
I think tomatoes could be a hit as Christmas decorations/gifts if they find that they can be consistently and cheaply grown at this time of year. The real challenge with tomatoes in the winter is that they need lots of light and warmer temperatures. (So maybe not all that different from poinsettias, when you get right down to it.) I’m sure they would take less time on the bench in the greenhouse to reach fruiting stage.
Tomatoes – coming to the holiday store near you!
