Garden Lessons

The garden has taught me a few things.  Patience, on my, you must have patience.  It doesn’t produce according to your excitement about it.  You do all this work preparing the plot and planting, and of course spending and then, you wait.  I have 7 tomato plants of various breeds (is that what you call them?).  The one that have produced so far are yellow pear tomatoes, not much bigger than a cherry tomato.  They are very prolific, growing in bunches similar to grapes.  And the vines themselves, they have just about taken over the entire plot of 8’x4’ and there are only two!  This has made it very difficult to even see the ripe ones, even on the other 5 plants.  I can’t even see the lone cherry tomato plant since it is much closer to the ground and spread out, it is just overwhelmed.  The other four plants are holding their own but the pear tomatoes have invaded their space big time.  This ‘togetherness’ has negative effects.  Less sunlight to the inner areas and less air circulation.  This is also a good place for bugs.  I have had some loss to vermin but it certainly could be worse.  The non-pear tomatoes have yet to produce more than one ripe tomato, it is getting very late in the year to not be producing.  There are green ones everywhere but not near the scale of the pear.  Soon it will be getting to hot to set fruit even with the closeness that provides shade, it will get to hot.  We will still get more than we can eat, but not what I was hoping for, we may not get enough to make canning worth the effort.  Friends will reap the benefits.

As for my strawberries, I can barely see any of the 6 plants due to the invasion by the pears.  Fugidabout the parsley/cilantro.  I had pretty much given up on the strawberries anyway.  They don’t produce much and when they do, bugs get to them way before they are ready.  And sooouuurr, whew are they sour!  I won’t pull them out and see how they do when cooler weather gets here this Fall and have thinned out the tomato plants.  I still think all the rain we have had has had a negative effect on the flavor, not only of the strawberries but the tomatoes too.  I know that less rain makes fruit concentrate the sugar so I am assuming that it what is going on with crop.

I am pretty sure I will expand the garden to double it’s current size next year, mainly so I can have more room for the tomato plants.  No, I didn’t plant them too close together to begin with, for what my experience in the past had been.  They were 2.5’ apart.  They just went nuts.  I think that is due to the organic method I used, hauling in organic soil/compost and organic fertilizer that I didn’t hold back on.

Happy Trails