Patio Gardening Week 20: Red Spider Mites Take Over

The garden is not doing so hot. Those red spider mites I discovered last week are taking over. They seem to be affecting all the tomato plants and some of the peppers, and I’ve seen their webs on the squash/zucchini plants, and what’s left on the bean plants.

Some of our tomato plants look absolutely sickly and we’re unsure at this point if they’ll survive.

As far as treating the problem, we really haven’t been that diligent. I’ve tried to keep the plants well watered and spray the plants with water to keep them wet and discourage the mites, but it’s been very hot lately and there’s been distractions, so this treatment has not been very effective.

We intend to buy some neem oil to fight these little buggers, but haven’t had the time to go and buy some. Hopefully this week… It’s a shame how life gets in the way.

Despite the red spider mites, our tomato plants continue to produce (though obviously less) and the baby peppers are getting bigger.

Our basil is unaffected and unfazed by everything and continues to grow big and beautiful.

Everything else in the garden is sort of at a sickly stand still. It really is a pathetic sight, which I can’t seem to effectively capture with my camera.

No video this week so far. There may be one, there may not. If there is I will post it separately, otherwise we’ll get one up next 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.

Leave a Comment

Posted at 11:39 AM, August 31, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010: Week 19 - Icky Red Spider Mites

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

2 Comments

I’m sorry that I’m a day late on this post, but I was very busy yesterday with some other things and just didn’t get around to taking the pictures. Good news is, my camera will be back from repair tomorrow, so I’ll be able to take decent pictures again!

All right, I have to admit, I’m kind of burnt out on gardening. I’m actually the only one who takes care of the plants (the boyfriend just films the videos), and I’m kind of tired of it. I still water them and everything, I just haven’t been as attentive as I was in the past. I’m letting nature take it’s course.

As far as the squash plants go, they’re still producing flowers and growing, despite the powdery mildew, but I think I’ve given up hope on them producing any fruit. I don’t think we’ll try them again next year. It’s too bad, but I’m guessing our porch just doesn’t get enough sunlight for them.

We’ve had more deaths this week. We lost another cucumber plant and it looks like another pot of bean plants is on it’s way out. One of them seems to be making a comeback…

I think this just may be it for the beans though.

Our cherry tomato plant continue to produce, we harvested over 50 last week alone and we seem to be in a big of a lull again, though there’s more green tomatoes and flowers growing.

We’ve mentioned briefly before that some of the tomato plants were looking a little ick. Some of the leaves were turning yellow and brown and then curling up and dying.

They didn’t match any of the photos of tomato diseases online, so we just chalked it up to super hot and dry weather and inconsistent watering. Well the plants look worse this week, some of them really bad. Then today I noticed some webs on some of the leaves.

As I looked closer, I realized there were little dots on the webbing. Looking even closer, I saw they were moving around. I was then promptly freaked out and came inside to google it.

It looks like we have Red Spider Mites, which apparently thrive in hot dry conditions and can cause the icky appearance of our tomato plants. One of the treatments is to make everything very wet, so I’m going to try spraying the tomato plants frequently with water and see if that helps. If it doesn’t make a difference by this weekend, we’ll invest in some pesticides.

Hopefully this won’t get out of control, but who knows.

There is good news in the garden this week. The pepper plants are doing great, growing tall, and they continue to blossom. There are tiny peppers forming!

Now that we see how well they’re doing, I kind of wish we didn’t plant four of them. The thing is, I do not like peppers. The boyfriend loves peppers. I think one pepper plant would suffice, but considering we had 20 millions seedlings, 4 seemed like a reasonable number. We’ll definitely scale that down for next year.

The basil is still a powerhouse. We made more pesto this weekend and froze the leftovers. Hopefully we can keep that up and stock up on enough frozen pesto to last through the winter.

Here’s the video for this week. It’s short and sweet:

2 Comments

Posted at 12:22 PM, August 24, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010: Week 18 - Cucumber Casualties

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

Leave a Comment

Well, this week is definitely bitter sweet. Last week, some of our cucumber plants were not doing so well and two of them succumbed this week. We also lost a pot of our bean plants (3 plants). The other ones are looking okay, but not their best.

I think the heat wave was what did the beans in. That’s finally ended. Today it’s much cooler and the high is only in the lower 80s. I even have the windows open right now to let in some fresh air, which is nice.

Here’s a lovely shot of our garden through the window:

There are more cucumbers growing on the plants that are still alive. Hopefully they’ll make it and we’ll enjoy more cucumbers this year.

On the upside we have tons of tomatoes, with new ones ripening each day and new blossoms appearing, so hopefully we’ll have a somewhat constant stream of tomatoes for the rest of the season.

We’ll harvest more tonight for dinner. This weekend we harvested 15 tomatoes and pruned the tops off our basil plants.

Thinking ahead to winter, we decided to make a bunch of pesto and whatever was left over from dinner we froze. We just put the extra in an ice cube tray to freeze it, then transferred the cubes to a freezer bag. We’ll keep doing this for the rest of the season and hopefully will have enough frozen pesto to get us through the winter.

We’ve used up most of the scallions, there’s just a few left. Next year we will stagger their planting so there’s a more consistent stream.

That’s it for this week. Here’s our video:

Leave a Comment

Posted at 12:30 PM, August 16, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010: Week 17 - Harvesting Tomatoes

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

Leave a Comment

I’m sorry I didn’t get this post up yesterday. That was due to pure laziness and I was in a funk. Part of that funk was because things haven’t been going so well with the garden this past week.

We’ve had that fun pattern of storms, humidity, and damaging winds alternating with really hot days and it’s taken a toll on the plants this week.

The worst of the lot is the cucumbers. I think about 2 or 3 of them are on the verge of death now. The powdery mildew has completely taken over them and then the strong winds blew them around so much and ripped them from their stakes. They look like a pathetic wilted messes and I don’t think they will all survive.

We do have some good cucumber news this week! We picked our first beautiful, not deformed cucumber. I think this must be the pickler variety (we planted both pickler and spacer cucumbers). It was beautiful and tasted great.

Last week we were excited about finally seeing some female flowers on the squash plants. We had one that opened but closed before I saw it, so it wasn’t pollinated. Since then, more buds have formed but they all turn brown and black and shrivel up before they even open.

This is happening on both the squash and zucchini plants and it’s extremely frustrating. We have no clue what the cause is.

Some great news is those ever late to the party peppers have buds forming on them, so hopefully soon there will be flowers and peppers growing. (It was impossible for me to get a picture of this with my crappy camera, but the buds are featured in this week’s video.)

The tomato plants continue to blossom and we have cherry tomatoes of all sizes growing. We haven’t seen any more blossom end rot, so that’s great.

We harvested our first tomatoes last night and added them to some pasta salad with some scallions from our garden as well. The tomatoes are absolutely delicious and I look forward to harvesting more as they ripen.

Here’s this week’s video:

Leave a Comment

Posted at 11:07 AM, August 10, 2010 by Tiffany

Patio Gardening 2010 Week 16: Female Flower on the Squash

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening

Leave a Comment

This week has been a little more exciting in our garden. Last week was mostly just waiting. We’re still waiting, but at least we harvested some this week.

This week’s haul included 2 cucumbers and 6 beans. They were delicious. Also, we use the basil and green onions whenever opportunity arises. We’re still impatiently waiting on those tomatoes, but there’s some good news this week:

They’re turning orange! I hope we have some yummy cherry tomatoes ready to eat in the near future.

This is even more exciting: I spotted a female flower on the squash plant.

Unfortunately, by the time I saw it, the flower had already closed up. We’re not sure if it was pollinated, so we’re waiting with bated breath to see if it will shrivel up and fall off. I saw more female flowers in the making on both plants, so hopefully there will be squash in our future!

Two of our cucumber plants are getting huge–they’ve outgrown their stakes!

This one is now vining it’s way up the railing. I’m curious to see how much taller they’ll get. There’s more female flowers and baby cucumbers forming on most of the plants. We have a nice one that’s growing long and fast–hopefully our first normal, not misshapen beauty. (I noticed at the farmer’s market this weekend that a bunch of their cucumbers were misshapen as well, so I don’t feel too bad about ours).

Unfortunately one of our cucumbers is on death watch.

I’m afraid it may succumb to that relentless powdery mildew. It will be our first casualty if it does. I’m keeping an eye on it and hopefully it will pull through.

As far as general gardening goes, I planted a few more lettuce seeds to keep that producing consistently. We’ve also been thinking a lot about what we want to grow next year and gardening supplies we need to buy. As the summer is winding down, a lot of stores are putting their gardening supplies on sale. I was able to pick up a new pair of garden gloves for 69 cents and a nice trowel for 99 cents at Jewel this weekend. We’re keeping our eyes out for clearance sales on seeds (we store them in the refrigerator to make them last longer) and hanging baskets for the patio.

If you want to start container gardening next year or add on to what you’ve already started, this is a great time to go out and find some deals. Check hardware stores, grocery stores, and mass merchandisers like Target and Wal-Mart. All of their seasonal stuff has to go to make room for back to school sales and other fall items, so you’ll probably score some great deals.

Here’s the video for the week, which features a cameo of my rabbit Barney: