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.

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