Patio Gardening 2010: Week 17 – Harvesting Tomatoes
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:
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.