Some Eggplants, Cats and Bolting Lettuce

I think I will have too many eggplants soon. Here I am holding a spent ichiban bloom next to a orange Turkish eggplant. You can see that the Turk is much smaller. The Turkish eggplant will become about the size of an egg, though it looks as though it may produce bunches of eggplants like grapes. I am very curious about how they'll taste.

Here's the actual plants. Both ichiban and Turkish orange(or is it orange Turkish?) are fairly large for eggplants. I guess 4 feet is typical so I have short stakes for them. I also have pruned them to have fairly bare stems at least up to a point as I have interplanted many things below them that need the light. I also limit their branching out. They don't get as overgrown as tomatoes but it does make it easier for me to see what's going on and in theory their fruit should be more consistent, especially the ichiban.

My latest poll is closed. The results are as follows

• Cats-5 (55%)
• Flowers-6 (66%)
• Tomatoes-6 (66%)
• Bugs-4 (44%)
• Birds-5 (55%)
• Greens-8 (88%)
• Weeds-7 (77%)
• Compost-8 (88%)
• Disease-6 (66%)
• Death-3 (33%)
• Bokashi, come on, BOKASHI!-5 (55%)
• Ummmmmmm-4 (44%)

There was a total of 9 votes. Given that small sample I can only conclude that I will blog about whatever I feel as usual. I chose my topics at random anyway. Now I know that I do not have a large following but based on my analytics, I DO have more than 9 regulars and I do want their opinions.

Anyway, given the randomness I will do more posts about cats, because they amuse me and they are a secret joy to people. Why do we have LOLCATs? because people like them even if they are tired of them. So LOOK AT THESE CATS!

You'll also be hearing more about bokashi. I have noticed that my bokashi tomatoes look better than my non-bokashi tomatoes. I am also finding it cheaper and less complicated than as described by others. More on that later.

My final picture for this post shows a red lettuce bolting. This is not highly recommended. It looks kinda nice right now though. I am letting a number of my lettuces bolt. I probably should just pull most, if not all of them up but I do have guilty feeling when I perform herbicide on my domesticated plants. The pluses of letting this bolt is that later I may collect seeds for future plantings. The blooms will attract beneficial insects and if I really let it go, I will have no need to sow any lettuce seeds. My permaculture tendencies are showing.

Garden Dreams

This love lies bleeding amaranth came from Garden Dreams. I love Garden Dreams! They are located at 812 Holland Avenue in Wilkinsburg.

This place sells seedlings, mostly tomatoes. This past season if I had known about them I would have got all mine there but somehow I was oblivious. They have somewhere around 100 varieties of tomatoes and use organic methods.

Anyway, I got this lovely plant there and of all the things in my garden, it receives more compliments than anything else.

Garden Dreams has a website but it seems not to be active right now. I think they won't be doing a lot until February or so.

In addition to tomatoes they also sell pepper plants, eggplant plants, various herbs and a few flowers. I believe that everything they sell is edible in a way including this amaranth though I honestly have not intention of harvesting it, at least not this year.