Patio Gardening 2010: Week 15 - Waiting for Tomatoes
I’m sorry that I’m a day late on this post. We had a couple different things come up this weekend that were unexpected, and we haven’t even gotten around to filming this week’s video yet. The plan is to film that tonight, so I will post it when it’s online.
Not too exciting this week plant-wise. We’ve had some super hot weather and then some crazy thunderstorms on Friday and Saturday. Powdery mildew is still running rampant and I’m worried it may claim a casualty this week.
It was pretty windy for a couple days so the cucumbers and tomatoes kept getting blown over. The cherry tomato plants have been getting so tall that they’ve outgrown their bamboo stakes, so I rigged up a little set-up with rope and string to keep them growing upwards and keep them from whipping around in the wind so much that they topple over.
Now if only those darn tomatoes would ripen.
We harvested another cucumber this week and hopefully can do 2 more this week. Maybe some beans as well.
Whenever we can, we use the basil, green onions, and lettuce. We’re so pleased with how well the lettuce is doing that next year we’ll probably grow more lettuce type plants. There’s something really fulfilling about going out to our garden and picking our own food. I also like the money it’s saving us.
The squash and zucchini plants are huge and the pumpkin is still spreading it’s vines. No female flowers yet on any of them. I’m getting impatient!
I’ll edit this post with the video as soon as it’s filmed and up. Here’s the video:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 14 - Blossom End Rot
Overall it hasn’t been too exciting this week. The weather has been been hot and I’m not sure if the plants are liking it too much. I try to keep them well watered, doing it in the morning and at night. No fatalities yet!
I did think I was going to lose my mind this week dealing with the cutworms. Every time I went out to water, I’d find 4 or 5 of them, and just when I though I found them all, there were more. I also went out at night, when they’re actively eating, and and plucked them off the plants.
Now I think we’re finally rid of them. I haven’t seen any for several days and I hope that’s the last of this mess.
We have 3 cucumbers that look like they’ll be ready for harvest this week or next, so that’s very exciting.
The tomato plants are still producing flowers and tomatoes are forming. They’re all still green and we anxiously await their ripening. On one plant we noticed 3 of the tomatoes weren’t looking right.
The bottoms were dark brown and bizarre looking. I did a little Googling and it looks like blossom end rot. One good thing is that this is a condition and not a disease, so it won’t spread to the other tomatoes. It seems to be caused by a calcium deficiency and only effecting one plant, so we’ll keep our eye on it.
We harvested 4 more beans this week. I’ve seen less flowers, so I wonder if the beans will just be producing less and less as the summer goes on. I believe the seed packets said to stagger planting for a continual harvest, so it looks like we may just be done for the summer.
Other than that, we’ve started to enjoy the green onions this week with our meals. They’re pretty thin still, but they are packed with flavor. Also, our Basil has started to flower, so we cut the tops off to prevent flowering and make sure it will keep producing leaves.
The zuchinni and yellow squash have started to flower again, but no female flowers yet. The pumpkin is still growing, though some of the leaves are yellowing and have powdery mildew (grumble grumble). One of the vines is about 3-4 feet long and we have to be careful not to step on it. I’d really love to get a pumpkin out of this, but there’s not female flowers yet.
Overall our patio garden has gotten pretty huge and seems to be taking over the balcony. It kind of sucks since we can’t really use the balcony for anything else, but it’s really awesome to go out there and smell all the different plants.
Here’s this week’s video:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 13 - Cutworm Invasion?
The plants seemed to survive our week long vacation. I don’t know how the weather was here in Chicago (I heard it rained) but where we were in New Hampshire it was hot, hot, hot!
Unfortunately, my digital camera did not survive the trip. It had a nasty fall on our last day of vacation, so the lens is messed up. I am stuck using my older camera until I get a replacement, so I apologize for crappy pictures with weird colors.
Our first cherry tomatoes appeared this week. We are extremely excited abut that. There are more blossoms on the plants and we hope to be up to our necks in cherry tomatoes soon.
I’ve found 9 more of the caterpillar type bugs I discovered eating the cherry tomato plants last week. I think they may be cutworms, though I’m not entirely sure. They completely pigged out on the pepper plants while we were gone and are much bigger now (about 1-2 inches–you can see them in this week’s video).
They’ve also started eating the new tomatoes.
They hide in the soil during the day. When I water the plants in the morning and the evening, they come crawling out and I just scoop them out and relocate them to the yard. I hope to eventually get them all and not have to resort to pesticides. We are a little worried about the pepper plants. Hopefully they will recover.
Our friend who was house sitting for us didn’t harvest anything while we were gone, so we came home to 2 bloated and yellow looking cucumbers. We’ll attempt to eat them, but we assume they look like this because they were on the plant too long.
The powdery mildew has continued to flourish since we left, so I will resume my treatments of the 10% milk 90% water solution and hopefully we can keep it in check. The cucumber plant that has it the worst has 3 cucumbers growing on it right now and we’d hate to lose them.
Otherwise, I’m back to my regular routine of watering the plants twice daily and fertilizing once a week.
Here’s the video for the week:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Gardening Links Round-Up 7-8-2010
I’m not home right now to update about my garden, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share some useful and interesting links on gardening.
These are all links to things I’ve read recently on the subject of gardening and I though were useful enough to share. Check them out and feel free to share your favorite gardening articles and blogs in the comments.
- How to Care for Your Garden While on Vacation
- Gardening on a Budget: Seven Tips for Success
- Make Your Own Pop Bottle Irrigation System
- How To Grow Chillies
- Growing Herb Tea
- Five Gardening Mistakes I’ve Made
- How to Support Growing Cherry Tomatoes
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 11 - Cherry Tomato Flowers
This week hasn’t been too different from last week. We still have the same pattern of stormy days alternating with super hot days. This makes it a challenge because I’m trying no to over water on rainy and humid days but then have to make sure to water enough on hot and dry days.
We still have powdery mildew on some of our cucumber plants, which I’m still treating with the milk/water solution. The flowers and cucumbers seem to be unaffected, it’s just the leaves, so I’m not going to worry too much.
The winds are still brutal, but everything seems to be holding up fine. I had to add a taller stake to some of the cucumber plants because they’re getting huge. We have two cucumbers that are getting pretty big, and more female flowers forming.
Unfortunately we haven’t pollinated all of our female flowers successfully and have seen a couple shrivel up. It actually happens pretty quickly, so we don’t have any false hopes. Here’s a picture of a failed pollination:
Our bean plants continue to produce, which is great. There are still no female flowers on the pumpkin, squash, and zucchini plants.
The most exciting change this week is that we now have flowers on one of the cherry tomato plants! I also see some buds forming on other plants, so hopefully we’ll have cherry tomatoes soon. They are self pollinating, so I don’t have to do anything with them.
I have to go pick some basil now for pesto tonight. I’m looking forward to it!
Here’s the video for this week. In it I give a demonstration of the technique I use to pollinate the female flowers on our cucumber plants.
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 10 - Storms & Powdery Mildew
Sorry to get this post up a day later than usual. I was working on some other projects yesterday, and we didn’t even get the video up until last night, so I’m posting today. Good news is that my camera is back from the shop, so we’ll have better quality photos starting next week.
The weather hasn’t been treating us too well this week. Last week it was rainy, chilly and humid. So we started out this week with some powdery mildew on some of our cucumber plants.
This is the first bout of disease we’ve had to deal with, and I’m not happy about it. I clipped off the leaves that had it the worst, and spray the rest of them with a mixture of 1 part milk and 9 parts water. As a precaution, I sprayed the unaffected cucumbers, plus the squash, zucchini, and pumpkin. Hopefully that will take care of it. We’ll see.
Here’s a picture of the powdery mildew from before I hacked the leaves off:
Our tomato plants shot up after we staked them, which is great. We may have to cage them soon if they keep growing at this rate. The unfortunate thing is that Friday night two very severe thunderstorms swept through the area, with winds 60-70MPH. Our poor plants were beat up pretty bad–especially the tall ones like the beans and tomatoes. (Check out some footage of the wind in our video) The tomatoes are looking a little worse for the wear now.
We’re supposed to have more thunderstorms this week (we had one late last night too). Hopefully they won’t effect the plants that much. I’m mostly worried about the humidity helping to spread the powdery mildew.
On Sunday we were able to pick about 12 more beans, which we fried up in olive oil and had with dinner that night. We also picked a ton of basil and had a delicious caprice salad (basil, fresh mozzarella, & tomato drizzled in olive oil–then we eat it with big crackers). Unfortunately, we didn’t grow the tomatoes, but it was great to save money on the basil (they sell packages with about that much basil in it for about $6 here. It’s robbery!).
We’ve had a few more female flowers show up on some of our cucumber plants and they’re starting to grow into little cucumbers. Hopefully I hand-pollinated them well enough and they won’t fall off!
Check out the video for this week:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 9 - Stakes & Hand Pollinating
First, we finally uploaded the Week 8 video on Saturday, so you can watch that now at last week’s post. Sorry about the delay. We are back on track this week (though my digital camera is still in the shop, so the photos aren’t that great).
The weather lately has been cool, windy, and rainy. I don’t know what effect that has on the plants. We don’t have to water them as much, which is nice. I was worried that maybe the cooler weather would stunt plant growth, but everything seems to be growing anyway.
The tomato plants really started to shoot up this week. We stopped by the hardware store and bought some bamboo stakes to stake the cherry tomatoes and cucumbers. I have to admit, I’m getting impatient when it comes to those cherry tomatoes. I want them to start producing now, and I’m a little worried they’ll decided to start while we’re out of town in July!
The most exciting development this week was I spotted our first female flower! If you don’t know why this is significant, it’s because cucurbits (cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, etc) have two types of flowers, male and female. The female flower is the one that actually produces the fruit.
The way you can tell them apart is a female flower has a “swollen ovary” below the petals, which becomes the fruit after pollination. In the photo above, you can see the female flower on our cucumber plant.
These plants are insect pollinated, and since we don’t really have that many bees in Chicago, I’m doing my best to hand pollinate, though I’ve never done it before and don’t really know what I’m doing. We’ll see how it turns out.
It’s been nice to eat some of the items from our garden. We harvested a few more beans this week and picked some basil to garnish our pasta last night (plus our rabbit Barney enjoyed some fresh basil as well).
Here’s the video for the week. If it’s not showing up, you can view it here.
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 8 - The Plants Are Flowering
This update will be pretty short this week. We had a busy weekend, and we on a film set from 5-11PM last night, so we didn’t have time to upload the video to Youtube yet. I don’t know how to use the boyfriend’s new camera, so hopefully he’ll put it up tonight. We have filmed it though, it just needs to be converted and uploaded.
Also, my digital camera is on it’s way back to Samsung for repair so I have to use my old digital camera for pictures. (The LCD screen on it is broken, so I can’t see the pictures when I take them. I apologize for any crappy photos.)
The weather has been cooler this week. It’s also been raining a lot and insanely windy outside. I feel bad for the plants because that wind is rough. They’re troopers though.
Last week we harvested beans for the first time. I was able to harvest a few more during the week, and I think there will be more ready maybe tomorrow.
The pumpkin plant flowered this morning, which is great! It’s really growing in comparison to the other plants and seems to be flourishing. I’ll be really excited if I get a pumpkin out of this–no matter what size.
The cucumber plants are flowering as well. I’m anxious about seeing more growth from the tomato and pepper plants. I feel like they haven’t done much of anything in awhile. Maybe it’s the yo-yo weather? I’m fertilizing weekly and hopefully that will help.
We bought some flower seeds and after we get some more soil we plan to plant them in the window box to give our patio a little more color (and maybe attract some of those butterflies I’ve seen around our neighborhood).
The video isn’t up yet, but I will add it to the post when it is. Here’s the video:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Patio Gardening 2010: Week 7 - Transplanting & Harvesting
This has been a somewhat eventful week concerning our container vegetables. We finally finished transplanting–all of our pots are full and as long as they all survive the transplant, there will be no more transplanting this season! We still have some seedlings left, so if something dies off, we could potentially transplant something else into the pot. Fingers crossed that all the plants lived.
Another thing we did this week was thin out the extra seedlings, just so each pot has the correct amount of plants for it’s size. The pink window box is another story, though we thinned out the green onions some and transplanted that rogue tomato plant.
The plant promptly wilted immediately after transplanting (which you can see below), which freaked me out, but it bounced back by the next morning. It’s bigger than any of our other tomato plants so far, so I hope it will soon start producing cherry tomatoes.
This week I was glad to see the first flower on our zucchini plant with another bud ready to bloom soon. I need to do some research on pollinating the zucchini plant because I’ve heard it can be difficult.
We had some good and bad experiences with the bean plants this week. Last week the first bean pods appeared. This week, all of the bean plants seemed to be effected by the sudden heat wave last week (we went from highs in the 60s to highs in the upper 80s). Many of the leaves have turned a little brown, and some have shriveled up. The most interesting thing was the effect of the heat on the bean pods on one plant.
As you can see, the pods curled into a little spiral. My research found that it was probably caused by the heat. I went ahead and plucked those off, along with the dead leaves.
In good news, we were able to do our first harvest on Sunday, plucking off 6 large bean pods. There are more little bean pods growing, and I think a few more will be ready in a couple days (I picked 2 more pods this morning).
The cucumbers that were wilting previously have been absolutely thriving, so we re-potted 3 of them into a bigger pot to see how they’ll do. So far so good. Some of them are developing buds.
Here’s the video for the week:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
Weird & Thrifty Sunburn Remedies from Around the Internet
Happy Memorial Day everyone! I hope everyone (no matter what country you’re from) takes a moment today to think of the soldiers who have died fighting for your rights and freedoms.
This is just a quick, fun post for today, since I hope most people are out and about enjoying their 3-day weekend (plus I have a ton of things to do today). The weekly vegetable gardening post will be posted tomorrow. The video is already up on our youtube channel if you can’t wait.
To celebrate the warm weather and the official beginning of Beach season, we had a beach day yesterday. Since we live so close to the beach, we walk down there a lot, no matter the season, but this was the first weekend we could swim. We stripped down to our swimwear and thanks to my fair skinned ancestors (and despite my fastidious sunscreen applications), I got a little burned.
It wasn’t that bad: my cheeks and forehead were a little pink last night. My neck (in this certain spot where I always seemed to get burned) was quite red, and my shoulders and upper back were a little pink and red. I turned to my two tried and true home remedies.
This is one I learned from my dad: for slight burns on my face, I either wash with or rub in with Noxema Original Face Wash (the kind in the blue tub). The other one, is the typical one, using aloe.
Just for my own info (and because I’ve recently found out that some people believe increasing the intake of Omegas and other good fatty acids helps prevent and heal sunburns and I want to learn more), I searched for some sunburn remedies and treatments. This time around I found some really bizarre suggestions I’ve never heard before.
Now, I’ve never tried any of these. I am not a doctor and cannot give medical advise. I cannot speak for their effectiveness. If anyone has used these techniques, I’d love to hear about it. These are often things you may already have around the house, so it could save you from running out and buying some aloe to treat your burns. Some of these seem a little weird.
- Dr. Pepper
- Windex
- Colgate Toothpaste
- Tide Laundry Detergent (take a bath for blisters)
- Mustard
- Potato Slices
- Yellow Peach Juice
- Saving Cream
- Raw Honey
- Milk of Magnesia
- Corn Starch
- Vinegar
- Evaporated Milk
- Baking Powder Paste
- Pepto Bismol
- Vagisil
- Preperation H
- Neosporin (immediately after sun exposure)
- Noxema
- Cold Tea Bags
- Oatmeal
- Aloe Vera
- Vitamin E (oil or pills)
