I pulled the Yukon Gold potatoes at week. Didn't get as many as last year, but shit happens. I'm done planting cucumbers. We've eaten just one, the rest get fed to the pheasants. I'll probably cut back on green beans next year too. Even staggering the planting, we end up with a ton and I haven't had a lot of luck freezing them. Not as many zucchini this year but the pumpkins are going like gangbusters. So maybe we'll find some pumpkin recipes this Fall.
Engineering Fail. I drastically underestimated the weight that my cross-bar for the strings would need to hold. Nothing has broken yet, but the crossbar is sagging A LOT and is looking not good. Well, let's face it, it was a hacky attempt at a crossbar with a few recycled pieces of strapping I had used for my previous cherry tomato cage... I was lazy and didn't rip a longer piece from some 3'x16"x12' rough cut boards I have in the garage from the local sawmill. As much as I'd like to think that this is "lesson learned', ha! As if. Meanwhile, I still have NO RIPE TOMATOES but there are a mind-boggling number of huge bunches of green ones that seem like they're going to ripen in the next few days... here's hoping we get some good weather. The stringing method I tried is kind of working, but I'm not fully happy with it... I think it's because I didn't keep up with the pruning and twining of the plants, so they grew up big and bushy and became less and less easy to wrap up in the strings, so a lot of them are supported, mostly, but not totally. Combine that with the drooping of the crossbar, and it's OK, but not good. Needless to say I'll be revisiting that whole setup again next year. I might even do up a more permanent aluminum setup seeing as I cannot imagine a time when I wouldn't be planting tomatoes there. Until then, "here, jam this up under there to try and help support that piece of shit thing you hacked together in the first place".
I always saw the string methods as kind of half measures and huge time sucks keeping up with, particularly the weaving. Just get your ass some concrete mesh wire rolls from Home Depot and make cages. Did you spray for molds and funguses? Like early/late blight? You look like you don't have a spot of it. I fight that shit all year. My season is going meeeehhhh since I got it in late and just refused to do the work of shading them. Ive got an alright crop going but depends on the type. My Yellow Brandywine have hardly set anything, I might have 5-7 set on five plants. My red brandywine are doing better but my past tomatoes have shrugged off the heat and are loaded with large fruit. I decided to test the theory that not pruning all suckers will leave you with the same net weight of tomatoes with more smaller tomatoes. I guess Ill see after my season is over but my tomatoes don't have that wow factor size I had in years past when I pruned everything.
Didn't do fuck all... I just don't have to water as much, due to the nature of the wicking bed... and when I do water, it's with a soaker line at soil level. The more water I keep off the leaves, the better off it'll be, I think.
Overall though, this year has been just really late due to being almost a month late in getting stuff transplanted outside. I'm really hoping that the weather doesn't go totally to shit before I start getting some tomatoes. Lots of jalapeno peppers, cucumbers, the herbs are fucking HUGE this year (lbs and lbs of basil), but the tomatoes and bell peppers are just not there yet. The swiss chard was very tasty, the broccoli was great, the romaine went fast.
Since you watch them every day it certainly does feel a whole lot longer. Usually it is right in line with what ever varieties you have's mature rate.
Oh lordy, I was about to post the same thing Nett. Life has been busy and I have not been on top of suckering the tomatoes over the last 2 weeks. I had been using string trellises this year. Tomato plants are huge and snapped a couple of these strings. The horizontal bar is sagging badly. 2 nights ago I got out there and trimmed the hell out of the tomatoes. I will post a picture when I'm not on mobile. I still need to get out there and trim up the plants more but this is a huge start. I could barely cramp all the trimmings into the composter. I noticed as time went on that the tomatoes were getting a little smaller because they were splitting up so much at the top but this should help. What I found very interesting was that my hands and arms turned green from trimming up the tomatoes at night. My hands were a dark blackish green and the stuff on my arms was barely perceptible but when I wiped off with a baby wipe it turned the baby wipe green. I've probably had about 12 lb of tomatoes harvested so far, most of that over the last two or three weeks. There are a ton of green ones out there waiting. I have played around with the ways I am processing the tomatoes. I blanched 3 lb of Roma's for pasta sauce and fire roasted / baked another 3 lb of beef steak and mortgage lifters for salsa. My mortgage lifters aren't huge but are very uniform fruit and a nice deep pink color. I don't think I will plant tomatoes on that particular fence again since it does not get as much sun as the main garden, and I think that contributed to the smaller fruit on the mortgage lifters. The zucchini are pretty much done, and have started dying off. I am getting lots of peppers, though not many bell peppers which is disappointing. I have harvested a few pounds of Anaheim peppers and get a few Jalapenos and banana peppers here or there. I also had some eggplant roll in. Okra is doing okay. Someone please shoot me if I ever talk about wanting more than a single cucumber vine in the future. I got my seedling flats put together but need to plant and label seeds. The temp is noticeably on the downswing so I know I am already behind by a couple weeks on the fall starts. I'll be starting with 2 kinds of baby bok choy, some lettuces, the few broccoli seeds i have left, and cabbage. I may throw some radishes and carrots into the mix as well. I am really hopeful for the bok choy. We eat a lot of that and the store is often sold out or their heads look super beat up.
Yeah, I think I have a solution for next year... I'm going to over-engineer a hollow-tube aluminum frame that will act as a support for various climbers, like cucumbers and tomatoes, but also a watering system... attach the hose to the end, and it fills up the bottom part of the frame, that has holes/nozzles in it. Should be a simple little welding gig that will give lots of strength and functionality, and be another "because I can" project.
Hey now, that's a really cool idea. I have soaker hoses that I have been using that work really well but that idea you have is fascinating. I'll be watching to see how your project goes. I'm on either year three or four of the soaker hoses so they probably will not last too many more years and I'll either need a new idea or replacement hoses. I use electrical conduit to make the legs of the A-frame. Before I moved I had a longer garden and had three pairs of legs with the horizontal metal piece. I thought I could get away with just two pairs of legs in my smaller space but I think I will go back to using all three pairs to prevent drooping. The strings I used were okay but I will definitely have to modify that part in the future. They held up pretty well and only snapped once the Tomato Vines were massive. I think I will make some small braids with the string to increase strength. I bought a huge roll and have only used about half of it so I am going to use it till it's gone.
I’ve never been able to find good soaker hoses that last any period of time. Probably been thru 3 sets, and am done with them. I figure a hollow frame with drain holes for distribution is the way to go.
Design your frame and hole sizes as meticulously as you can. I tried to do something along those lines with a used garden hose. I used a soldering pen to melt holes into the hose for a similar effect but my holes were too big and pressure was completely lost way prematurely. If you could design it with the hose attachment up higher on the frame, gravity could help you out too.
Hose attachment up top so that water spreads and is gravity dripped rather than pressure sprayed. I also have a supply of actual adjustable threaded nozzles that I can tap and screw into the frame to control flow rates, as well as remove to clean out gunk if needed.
Brilliant! Of course they have irrigation nozzles like that. I didnt think of it because ove never used them myself. There are people around here who have pipes/pvc laid above ground to run irrigation and sprinkler heads out to fields so I guess I have seen something like that before. Great ideas.
These are more like burner pilot threaded inserts for BBQ, etc. I've also got a friend who has a shop who got in an order of grease nipples that were all missing the ball bearings and springs, so they're basically just open holes. They were for an industrial application so they are pretty big (normal, smallish ones would probably be too small for water to flow out of, due to the surface tension on the water). These ones are 14mm threaded inserts that should do a great job. He's bringing them over next week. Drill and tap a whack of these things into the bottom of the frame and I have no doubt that they'll let water flow out at a good, steady state. I really want the gravity feed so that all the nozzles get the same output flow regardless of where you fill it from. Normal pressure systems like that get big fluctuations of flow based on where the output is in the system... usually the ones closest to the input source are the highest flows, while the ones off in the distance have next to nothing. By using large, square tubing (with lots of volume) I'm hoping that you can fill it all up and it'll act like a self-distributing water chamber that will have pretty well the same output flow for all nozzles; the water level should be close to the same across the entire thing, so the head pressure should be the same for all nozzles. So it's basically a non pressurized system that just flows out the bottom. We'll see how it goes... but I'm intrigued by the idea.
I guess you'll be doing above watering then? Or will these be offset to the side some way. I used to water everything by hand with the hose but set up soaker hoses mostly for the time savings. I do love how the soaker hoses get everything watered reasonably deeply without disturbing the soil or getting the foliage wet. I think if you can consistently do that you really limit your infestations of pests and other leaf problems like blights and molds. Here is my sad sack of a trellis doing a bad job of keeping the toms up. This is AFTER a big trim. I'm about to get out there and clip it some more. A thing I think I did right this time around: the straw on top of the soaker hoses. It has really kept the plants dry, plus kept the weeds down. It's $5.99 for a 3 string bale around here. At the rate I'm using it for the ducks, it's less than $10/year for straw that I get to use twice. Neat! Lay and egg here, lay an egg there, lay an egg anywhere.
My hot peppers have been a bit underwhelming this season. I killed one transplanting it, and another other mid-season somehow - one day it was fine, the next it was on its way out. No idea what happened there. Both Kraken varieties are just dropping flowers instead of setting fruit. The Lemon Drop that was so great last year probably only has 10-15 peppers so far. Same with the Saras Green, but I didn't get a single pepper of that variety last year, so I guess that's a win. I did actually get a few Ghosts this year, unlike last year but with only about a month of growing season left (we had a frost warning last night), I doubt they'll ripen as they're still pretty small (pictured). The definite highlight is the Sugar Rush (habenero like heat, but sweeter). Even though it looks like it caught a blight of some kind, there's easily 75-100 peppers on this thing (pictured). That's 2 years in a row it's been a stellar performer. 100% will grow again. ETA from rep: Fertilize every 2 weeks with a pretty standard 24-8-16 mix. Cal supplementation off and on, but I used a different product which may not be working as well.
I'd actually have the frame go well down to the ground level, and have the bottom part of the frame being the watering section. That way it's watering right onto the soil, not the leaves. I prefer that kind of watering so it doesn't sunburn the leaves, reduces mold potential, etc.