the good, the bad and the ugly

first let's talk about something good: tomatoes!!

SO we have never done this vegetable gardening thing before. this means that we are doing a lot of learning as we go. one thing i have learned is that since the goal of vegetable gardening is to eat what you grow, there are a lot of hopes and dreams that go with every seed you put in the ground. it is a little bit of magic to raise up food from tiny little seedlings!

here in the beautiful pacific northwest, we really don't get enough heat and sun to grow hot weather veggies such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and the like, especially not from seed. knowing that, we still really wanted to try tomatoes, since they are such the quintessential summer food. i bought 2 starts at a local edible plant sale in the spring. they start them from seeds in the greenhouse so they get a decent head start in life. i bought a moskovich and a purple calabash.

i have many books about gardening. many of them say the same thing, and some of them say slightly different things, and some of them say things the others don't say. this can be confusing and overwhelming or the first time gardener. you can always ask fellow gardeners or the interweb questions, but you will pretty much get the same result. LOTS of different answers. sometimes you just have to use your best judgment and hope for the best.

so i put my two tomato starts right into the ground immediately. i was super excited! and then it rained. a lot. for a long time. in retrospect it might have been better hold off putting them in the ground until it was more reliably dry and sunny. i think the roots ended up growing too close to the surface because it was so wet for so long. but then i recently read that i was supposed to dig them in a little extra deeper because they do grow extra roots near the surface (good to know!).

so fast forwarding a little.... we put tomato cages around them and waited and waited and waited. they grew and grew and grew. i did things like pinch off the suckers, and pet their leaves to help them grow hearty. then as soon as the sun started really shining, they went crazy! they got huge, and there were lots of flowers but zero fruit. we were well into july at this point, and it just wasn't looking good. i was starting to lose hope that we would ever see any tomatoes.

then we had the tomato emergency! it was at that point that i realized that i could and should prune the plants back quite a bit so that they could focus their energy on making fruit, and i did that. a few days later, even though they were in tomato cages (which is all i thought you really needed to do for a tomato) i noticed how seriously droopy they were. it finally occurred to us (we remembered that we had read) that they needed to have all their individual stalks staked so they could stand UP. they recommended that you use a ripped up t-shirt for this because it would be soft, so i found an old t-shirt to donate to the cause and jak and i staked it all up good! in the process of all this staking i discovered that there were lots of other little tomatoes hidden amongst the leaves that we hadn't seen, and since then i have seen literally dozens more appear!! now i just hope they actually ripen. if not... fried green tomatoes i guess!!

while i was ripping up t-shirt strips to tie up their stalks i was excited and i felt bad that we hadn't realized they needed this. i felt bad that i had sort of given up on them. the bottom hem strip of the t-shirt came off in one big loop and i threw it around my neck while i was wrestling with the 2 plants. afterward, feeling happy & hopeful, full of renewed summer tomato dreams i realized i was still wearing the t-shirt strip like a necklace. i decided that in solidarity with my tomatoes i would keep wearing it until we harvest our first tomato!

it's also worth mentioning that the plants had/have been wilting like crazy and so we have been watering the hell out of them almost every day. i don't know if this is because the roots are too close to the surface, or because we let them get too big & didn't prune them back or what, but they are thirsty. also all the books recommend that they get fertilized. we gave them our regular organic fertilizer mix that we use, but we didn't give them any tomato specific fertilizer. i don't know if that would have made any difference or not.

the bad and the ugly: aphids

i am not a friend of the aphid. aphids are TOTAL pooheads, and so are their busybody friends the ants. i was living in uneasy peace with them for awhile. i was diligently going over my artichoke, zucchinis and the green bean plants with an eagle eye and spraying off the aphids one by one, several times a day! i let them inhabit and almost kill my nasturtiums, they did a number on the borage too. since both of those plants are annuals, i was willing to let nature take it's course. but when i saw that they were going after my jasmine i declared war!!!

i broke down and bought some "organic" insecticidal soap and sprayed the jasmine down. i also sprayed some of the other flowers in the front yard that were showing signs of aphid infestation. i bought a big container of ladybugs just for the raised veggie beds and had a blast watching them make a ladybug city out of the garden (aphids are a favorite food of the ladybug!).

i was feeling really irrational about the whole thing. i wanted to obliterate every aphid in my garden (safely and organically of course!) and then i did some more reading and research. i guess that aphids and ants and the like are just a part of the garden, and i am just going to have to learn to live with them. i just need to ramp up my efforts to attract beneficial insects so that they can keep the aphid population in check.