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.