Green Fruit

My turkish eggplants are pleasing me even though I have yet to truly sample them. This is a unique growing experience. I suppose that I should use google to figure out how to best use these. These are not yet ripe. I have found numerous images of shiny orange eggplants.

These sungold are staring to ripen. Sungold are delicious as well as pretty. I suppose supersweet might rank slightly higher, that is if I only have room for one tomato it I might choose supersweet, but I think that these should be more common. Cherry tomatoes are necessary for me because they do ripen early. I can't stand waiting around for SOMETHING to ripen. Cherry tomatoes let me bid my time for the big'uns.

Speaking of of big'uns, here is a green carbon tomato. Last year a groundhog sealed his fate by gnawing the stalk of my carbon tomato. There were perhaps a dozen green tomatoes on it many as big as this one that I lost. I feel safe from groundhogs this year. If there were one around he wouldn't get to this one as it is growing in my tomato box.

This is simply a view of the left side of my front yard showing many edible plants flourishiing. An incomplete list is ghostbuster eggeplant, royal purple beans, sungold tomatoes, alaska nasturtium, strawberries, lemongrass, he shou wu... you get the idea.

I am so glad that yesterday was a traditionally cloudy Pittsburgh day. I like my photographs better.

Tomatoes (part II, frontyard)

Here's my prime gardening space, my front yard. Right off the bat I am breaking tomato growing rules. This tomato, a juliet cherry is growing under a globe arborvitae. I kinda ran out of room so I planted this and another cherry tomato under it. As it grew I broke the leaves off. It is too dark under the shrub for it to benefit much anyway and extra leaves can make it more susceptible to various afflictions. I also broke off extra branches. I will let it branch out a little, but not too much. I intend to train it to this railroad tie wall, possibly with landscaping staples. This borders the sidewalk and gets a lot of traffic so hopefully people walking by will sample these tomatoes and enjoy them. I think I will have some issues with nutrients here as the soil quality is pretty bad but I have taken steps to correct that.

Here's the 2nd wall tomato, a supersweet I think. It is on the driveway. I am training it towards the sidewalk. Supersweet cherry tomatoes will probably be in every tomato garden I have. They are very productive and taste great. They also are very early. They gratify me while I am waiting for my big tomatoes to do something. Unintentionally in this picture is a bottle of weed tea. I won't talk about weed tea in depth in this post but recommend any gardener to know about this.

Here is my most traditional tomato planting. These are sungold, an excellent cherry and costaluto genovese, a delicious and beautiful(to me) tomato. I can't even remember if there is any bokashi buried below these tomatoes or not but I did a lot of amending of the soil for these guys. Last year in this space I had artichokes. Unfortunately in Pittsburgh, wintering them outside is not a great idea. I dug them all up except for one which was killed by the elements despite extra mulching. Anyway, it might not be readily apparent here but I kept the diamond planting of strawberries around this bed. I also have decided this year to prune away most of the sideshoots and to strip my tomatoes of excess leaves. I want them to have a bare stem that goes above the companion plants around them. This should allow their companions to grow batter and also should make the tomatoes less likely to be infected with blight. I also have these tomatoes attached to a 7 foot stake. I will encourage them to grew very tall. There are some that believe that removing extra leaves makes tomatoes put more energy into growing tomatoes. Perhaps this is true.

Here's my tomato box. In it is a bucket of bokashi, buried very deeply. I think that this will be excellent for my tomatoes. Varieties here are carbon and brandywine. I think that this will need more water then the in ground tomatoes but this box is so big it might be be a big issue. I have to admit that around here, water is not the issue it is in other areas. We have 3 rivers so we never have to ration.

I'm going to post this in each post. Please take a moment to answer my little survey. Thank you!

Summer Garden

Sally sits on the stepping stone. She sits and stares as the carrots and radicchio sit before her.











Raindrops drip off the rosa bianca eggplant.













The porchmelon chose to grow on the porch wall. This is a good thing because otherwise I would have had to make some kind of sling.






This is a close up of an artichoke bloom. It's larger than lifesize but not by as much as you'd think.









Here is sungold cherry tomatoes co-mingling with scarlet runner beans.








I rather miss this.