August 30, 2009 Back From Vacation

After a week away at the beach, this is the mess we came back to. All the sunflowers were drooped from their own weight, many tomatoes rotting on the vine and on the ground, all the cantaloupes rotting, a watermelon split and rotting, and even a few of the peppers were rotting. I guess I picked the wrong week to leave everything!

I removed two tomato plants and pruned back the others. All the rotting tomatoes are now in a pile along with some other garden refuse. so things look a little more put together now. I harvested all that could be salvaged and there are still plenty of green tomatoes yet to ripen. So the season isn't over yet, but I definitely lost quite a bit!

August 16, 2009 Melons and Sunflowers

I've been pretty busy the last two weeks, hence the lack of updates. In that time all sorts of things have gone to hell in the garden. I haven't weeded the watermelon patch in about a month or so and it was so over grown that you couldn't even see the watermelon plants let alone the melons themselves. Stacey put a huge dent in pulling the big stuff the other day and I finished off the little she left for me yesterday. I hope that will buy me some time!

The real issue I've been having is with my tomatoes. It seems that they're a little top heavy and with only a single stake holding up the center the branches laden with tomatoes have become a problem. Some have broken off with some of the heavy storms, others are resting on the dirt where the bugs, critters, and fungus has taken some (but not all) of the 'maters. Next year I need to do three things different --

1) Cage them along with the stakes to support the branches.
2) Prune them back MUCH more.
3) Space them out even more. They're currently about 2 feet apart, but I'm going to try to add another foot between them.

Despite the problems I'm having, I still have more tomatoes than I know what to do with! Nice.

I also wanted to share some pics on how the melons are doing:

Also the sunflowers are all in full bloom! A couple of the flower heads have seeds set and I'll need to harvest fairly soon before the birds take too many. I've read a few methods of cooking the seeds but I'm going to try this one:

Sunflower seeds can be roasted by heating in a 300 degree F oven for 15-25 minutes. If salting is desired, soak seeds overnight in a brine of 2 tablespoons of salt to 1 cup of water. Boil the seed brine mix for a few minutes and drain. Spread seeds thinly on a cookie sheet and roast in a 200 degree F oven for 3 hours or until crisp. If roasted long enough, they are easy to shell.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/ptlk/1828.html


And finally I was taking pictures of all the bugs on the butterfly bush and thought this was a good one of a large carpenter bee hanging out.

August 4, 2009 Zucchini Pruning Update

here's an update on the pruned zucchini plants:

Take a look at the pictures of the day I cut the plants and a little over a week later. They seem to be coming back a bit. Some new flowers (all males) are popping up around the stem. Although there are several new leaves that have grown, most of the original leaves I left on it have a fair amount of powdery mildew. Not a good sign! But they've already exceeded my expectations - I kind of figured they would have been shocked to death after two days. If I get any more zucchini off of any of the remaining three plants I'll call it a success.

This was from July 24th:

...And this one from August 4th:

Check out the update to the Harvest count. It's starting to get impressive. I guess I have some more tomato sauce to make this week:



Several of the sunflowers are in full bloom. They ended up being between eight and nine feet tall. I'm pretty happy with that with so many in a small place. I think I'll space them out a little more than a foot next year!