The 2019 Gardens

[chocomouse]

Those look great Len! My container tomato (given to me by a friend with a greenhouse, I have no idea what variety it is) is only about 12-15 inches tall but has over 50 tomatoes, still green, on it. They are bigger than a cherry tomato, but I don't know how large they will get. I'm given a mystery tomato every year! Fun to watch it grow, not always such a great thing to eat!

[Joan Simpson]

Len your container garden plants are beautiful!Nice!

[RiversideLen]

Thank you Chocomouse and Joan. I've been using those containers for 5 or 6 years now, although this year I expanded from 2 to 4. It's a neat system, there is a coned plastic divider that separates the soil from the water compartment, there are holes in the cones that allows water to wick up into the soil. It holds about 4 gallons of water. So you just keep the thing filled and you have consistent and even watering.

[BakerAunt]

We have finished (and frozen some) of our bean crop. Our snow peas have finished up as well.

So far, I've gotten two tomatoes off the "Carbon" tomato plant. One was past its useful life; these tomatoes tend to have a dusky red he and dark green around the top when ripe, and so we missed seeing it was ripe. The other I used in a salad, and it is delicious. There are plenty of green tomatoes yet on the plant, as well as on the ones that my husband started from seed. I suspect that there will be a mad tomato rush at some point.

Some kind of caterpillar has been chomping my husband's broccoli plants, which have not developed any flowers. With the construction, the grass around the fenced garden perimeter is rather long. Next year we will try a "clear" zone around the perimeter. For now, my husband is executing any caterpillars he finds.

There are four peppers on my bell pepper plant. We are waiting for them to turn red, as we do not care for green ones. The plant has some flowers, so there may be more.

My husband never got to the woods to pick black raspberries, due to the construction, so we only ended up with a few from there. I was only able to make 3 1/2 cups black raspberry jam. However, 90& of the berries came from our front terrace. When my stepdaughter was here, she went out to the woods with my husband and tasted some of the last of the black raspberries and loved them, so I included the 1/2 cup jar with the birthday present we sent.

I'd hoped for lots of blackberries, since I always seed them; thus, I need lots in order to make straight blackberry jam. My husband's woods used to have some nice ones, but the trees have now come up and shaded them out. I've been picking what we have on the front terrace. I expect those to finish up this week. If I don't have quite enough, I'll sneak in some blueberries to make up the shortage.

Some of our wild blueberries on the terrace produced a bit of fruit, but my husband is saving those for seed. Our two commercial plants are young, and so had very little fruit--and one has been crowded by the construction scaffolding. I expect that they will do better next year.

My husband is going to try one more small bean crop. While it seems strange to think of a freeze when we are sweltering in August, the reality is that it could happen by the time they are producing, so he will put them toward the center where he can cover them if necessary.

[Mike Nolan]

We were out of town during black raspberry season this year, so I don't know how many there were, but I'm sure the birds enjoyed them all. But I was able to buy a jar of seedless black raspberry jelly at a small farmer's market on Saturday, so I'm happy. We've got some volunteer maple trees that seem to be crowding out the elderberries, I may have to get some more elderberry plants and put them along the east side of the house where the dogwoods are. Most of the dogwoods died off a few years ago when our gardeners cut them back, but they're trying to make a comeback this year.

[chocomouse]

BakerAunt, I'm curious about your terraces. Why so much difference between the north and south? Is it the amount of sunlight? Is the soil in both similar? Will you have the soil tested for pH and nutrients before you plant something new? Do you compost?

[Mike Nolan]

We're starting to get a trickle of tomatoes, I picked about 8 small ones again today, nearly all about the size of a ping pong ball, mostly 4th of July but a few Romas and one Better Girl. The plants aren't producing big fruit yet. I'm hoping the cooler weather we had last week triggered another round of blooms setting fruit, which will mean a good crop of tomatoes in late August or early September.

I saw an article online today stating that Minnesota corn farmers, who got their crops in late, like nearly everyone else, are now worried about an early frost further cutting yield. There are signs of an early onset of cooler weather here too, and I'm told the ruby-throated hummingbirds are starting to show up, maybe a week or so earlier than normal, so I started to get the feeders ready today.

[BakerAunt]

Chocomouse--We live on a bluff that has a steep hill down to the lake. We think that the cottage owners in the 1930s may have put in the terrace because a nearby neighbor remembers the woman's flowers from when she was a child. That woman's initials, A.M. (Anna Minas) are carved in the cement of the top of the concrete steps, so they certainly did the steps. The walls are stone, but may have been changed around by the people who bought the place in the 1950s. The terraces' original purpose may have been erosion control. (I've been researching the owners of the house and its history. It might make a good writing project.) When we moved in, there were a lot of an ancient reed plant on the various levels, some flowers, and two large trees. The black oak is still there, but we had to have the sassafras removed because it had heart rot, and had it come down in a hard blow it would have hit the neighbor's house.

My husband wants the terraces to be a natural landscape, which makes us stand out with the "suburbites" here. He has planted various native wildflowers and plants, as well as a couple more trees. He introduced the black raspberries and the blackberries, and now the blueberries. We actually got more black raspberries on the other side this time, so we shall see what happens in the future. I am allowed to pull a couple of kinds of weeds, but mostly I leave it alone, as once I pulled out a plant he wanted. Oops. My husband has been carting gravel out of each level, as well as plastic that was put down under the gravel by the 1950s-2004 residents to deter weeds. (It didn't work.)

It's a bit on the wild side, and once the house is complete, my husband will have more time to devote to it. We have columbine in the spring, black-eyed Susans, some day lilies, and other plants that attract butterflies, bees, and even hummingbirds.

I would like to start composting, both for the terrace and for our garden in the back. Once we are more settled, I plan to learn about how to do it.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

I picked tomatoes this morning, probably about 40 pounds worth, should make at least 6 quarts of sauce.

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[Mike Nolan]

I bought a two compartment tumbling compost bin from gardeners.com last year but I think I loaded it with too much 'brown' and not enough 'green' last fall because it hasn't produced any compost yet this season. I've been throwing more green stuff in it lately in the hopes of getting some compost by next spring. I probably need to put water in it more frequently, too.

Around here an open compost heap is an invitation to the raccoons, possums, foxes, mice, voles and other critters. It's probably even worse for you in Indiana.

[chocomouse]

I do "lazy composting", having tried all possible methods over 35 years. I have 3 open bins: 1. building this year's pile 2. sitting for a year 3. ready to use. I don't turn then, use a thermometer or worry about the brown-green ratio, just let them sit knowing it will take a year (they don't breakdown over the winter in Vermont). I collect garbage in a special small composting bucket on the kitchen counter, and transfer it when full to a 5-gallon pail on the deck, and then to the garden pile. We rarely have a problem with critters scavenging in it, not since the first few years (and after we stopped growing corn!). I do not put meat scraps in it, but do compost egg shells. Vermont has a new law in effect that we must compost all food scraps, including meat, we cannot toss them out with the trash, so I am searching for a commercial composter who will take my meat scraps.

[BakerAunt]

Raccoons love the trash barrels in our neighborhood. Once, before we moved here, we arrived and my husband, upon opening the trash can found a juvenile raccoon who was stuck. He tipped the can over so that the little guy could escape. The key, as we've explained to our neighbors, is to line up the trash and recycling bins so that the raccoons don't have a way to flip them open. Even without the trash cans, the raccoons are around. On one occasion, one got into our boat; usually they confine themselves to the pier. So, if we were to compost, it would have to be a closed bin, especially as there are foxes, mice, even coyotes around.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had coyotes here, too, though I haven't seen one lately. We also had a river otter once, he was truly lost as the nearest river or stream is a good mile away. But that was after several days of heavy rains and flooding and we were guessing he got flushed away from his usual haunts and went overland to try to get back home. And there was an elk that animal control followed through the neighborhood a few years ago before it broke a leg jumping a fence around the corner, we figure he almost had to have gone through our back yard to get to that fence.

For a while we had raccoons using our deck just outside the master bedroom door as a latrine, but between redoing the deck and cutting back on the trees that they were climbing up on to get to the deck, we seem to have discouraged them.

We also stopped feeding squirrels on the deck, as they were starting to eat the decking (composite wood) itself. That cut down on the number of raccoons and possums, too. Didn't seem to affect the cardinals much, but there are all sorts of berries for them to eat along the back fence.

The area where I put in elderberries about 10 years ago has kind of gotten overgrown with volunteer trees, mostly maple but one oak, so I'm planning to order a number of bearing elderberry plants next spring and put them in along the east side where we used to have a full row of dogwoods, but only a few of them survived being cut back several years ago.

The black raspberries have spread to that side of the yard, but I think we're going to rip them out on that side, we haven't gotten any berries the last several years, some years because the birds got them all first and other years because we were busy and didn't check to see if they were ripe yet until after they peaked. We seldom got more than a couple cups of them, anyway.

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