Tomatoes

...sort of.

I debated posting these photos as it might turn away anyone who thought I actually might know what I am doing here :(

The tomato harvest has been a bit of a disappointment this year....considering we planted 81 tomato plants in this yard alone (over 20 more in our home garden). I thought we would be able to make enough sauces, salsas and catsups to last thru the winter. Sadly, that is not to be the case and I will be heading to the Farmer's Market tomorrow to try to make up the difference....sigh.

Not sure what happened here but because the plants in our more shaded garden are doing fine I think it might have something to do with the unrelenting heat and possibly the fairly new soil. We will continue to amend with our own compost and try to add more manures this year to get the fertility up to snuff.

The plants mostly seem to be dying on the bottom half.

So we decided to try to protect the fruit with screens .

This is just pathetic....these are BellStar paste tomatoes, which are a small determinate tomato plant. Pretty sure they're not supposed to be this small.

This bed of Romas is probably the healthiest of the lot....they are shaded from about 3pm on.

Fortunately, most of the garden has been really productive this year. I'll post pics of our more successful plantings in the next week or so.

Pumpkins

Looks like someone is going to be carving a big 'ole Jack-O-Lantern this Halloween!

Not sure how big these will end up but they are a good size right now and as long as we can fight off the squash bugs, we'll let them stay in the garden. If it looks like they will get damaged, we'll pick 'em and store them in the cellar. Pumpkins were a complete failure last year....and these are the same seeds...so we are quite happy with our success.

And I spoke too soon on our onion failure. This box was planted about 2 weeks after the original sets (the ones that all went to seed) and these are doing wonderfully. I pick a few every day, some get used immediately, some get layed out in the shade to dry. Haven't bought onions in months!

Carrots.....

....finally! We have had amazingly poor results in the past with our carrot crops. The ones planted in the fall never seem to make much progress (last year 6 survived...mostly eaten by snails if they came up at all) and the ones in the summer wilt in the heat or bolt to seed before the carrots fully develop. We've tried planting under the shade of other plants, which works marginally, and planting later in the fall, which works not at all (no germination in the cold). This year we seem to have hit on the right combination of planting time and location. We planted around the first of March....in a bed previously growing broccoli...and the germination rate was fantastic. Tho the plants grew slowly...they grew!!!

We have been pulling up carrots for about a month now and yesterday I was able to make juice with the 8 lbs. the we picked....yippee yahoo! And the nice thing, the bed is still FULL of carrots. Now the question remains as to how much longer they can handle the 100+ temps before going to seed. This area does get a bit of shade in the afternoon but as soon as the plants start to flower we will pull the entire bed!