Harvesting and Planting

Never saw such a huge tomato plant! It's a cherry tomato and supposed to be small... must be 5' x 5'! Has lots of blossoms. If the weather stays warm, we're going to be begging neighbors to take them, along with the zucchinis.

For a long time we had no sets. At the suggestion of our gardener-friend-neighbor, we bought some blossom set. Seems to have done the job. Or maybe it's just that we finally had some sunny days. Now there are lots of these little green balls. Green tomato omelets with Jarlsberg cheese are pretty tasty, but we hope at least some of them ripen.

Note about watering: All the troughs are now taking at least some water in the 4" bottom reservoir each day. The tomato-zucchini trough takes a LOT.  A couple of weeks ago, we stopped top watering in that trough completely. The plants are thriving, so we assume their roots are well tapped into the reservoir. We still do light top-watering in the other three troughs, especially because of the winter-crop seedlings. 

Robin planted the first of our winter-crop seeds on July 25th. By row number from front to back, these seedlings are:

1. Left: spinach, Center: butterhead lettuce, Right, Romaine lettuce
2. Toscana kale
3. flat of Egypt beets

On July 29th, she planted more winter crop seeds... top left: beets; center left: kale, center: broccoli, right: carrots. We made a special trip to South Beach to get white pebbles to mark the trough.

These are the breakfast radishes. Like the beets, they push above the surface of the dirt rather than grow down. We don't know if that's normal or not. Doesn't seem to hurt them. They're slightly more "peppery" than the cherry radishes. The second crop, planted about 2 weeks after these is coming along nicely.

We harvested our first carrot today! It's not so big. Guess we'll wait a while longer to harvest any more of them.

The squash is going crazy! Robin harvested our first acorn squash (two more almost ready), our third eight ball squash and we stopped counting the zucchinis. For dinner tonight, we had fresh sliced zucchini, radishes and the one carrot to dip in blue cheese dressing with our pizza.