Ol' Nicodemus's Tomato Report

Things are looking pretty frigging nuts out there! 

All the green zebras have tens of tomatoes on, just waiting
for The Ripening

Oh, God, the Mexico midgets - each branch is weighed down
with its own little constellation.  Ate some last night with
mozzarella, lemon, olive oil, thyme, garlic, capers and anchovies.

Planting!

Fuck it!  Three green zebras it is!

Lettuces of the universe!

Marked then dated.  Well, not dated yet in
picture.

Also: leftover wood from making new beds,
will burn in NFL season as Joe Webb starts 5000 year
reign of the Vikings!

Final harvest? Maybe?

Got up and did basil and such for our two customers Friday. It was about forty degrees, which means we are getting to the bitter end. Still, we made $520 bucks this year.













































A forlorn pig. "This shit's gettin' all decimated and shit!" Nice mouth there, sunshine!

In fact,

can't be more than a couple of weeks at the outside now before these pups turn their ripe yellow and then I eat nothing but tomatoes for two months.

Yow!

Progress

Remember this?

Look!

Down on the farm with Preggo McPreggerson

Meanwhile, Picci says "A new sandbox? Sweet!"

Tomato box

SOMEone took the whole existing backyard bed and filled it with herbs, which, in theory, is dandy - but don't make Bighead McDumdum (aka me) have to walk all the way to the community garden to get a warm tomato or three for din-din! Christ!

Aha!, though, because I had a leftover 18' 2x10 board which I dutifully sawed to a nice 54" a side, hammered together and then filled with the full lasagne bed goodies. Closer to the house, too!

The Bride hopes I will use cages, but I want this shit to get all triffid-y and climb in the back of the house and choke us while we sleep! Yep!

Also, a whole lane for lettuce will be finished tonight, I hope!

Crops - still coming in!

Some of these are transplants from our big community garden, but as of this writing all this stuff is still thriving under our little ersatz hoop house in the back yard!

This is with the cover off to water and reaffix.

Purple cherokee # 1

Lost Gram Parsons track? Nope, this tomato (the tomato at left, I mean):

Oh, SHIT! Blossom end rot!

So all the time Nick Eddy's going "garden garden cats cats cats garden the Clientele cats garden garden Nabokov cats garden..." but evidently I don't know dick about anything, because, though I thought we have been watering adequately, we have fruit, on a couple of our zebra plants, that is getting the dreaded blossom end rot. Plants that are inadequately watered get this, as the fruits can't spread the necessary calcium through the growing fruit fast enough.

I'm gonna try a cure (hydrated lime in water) that the experts* say will help and then really water a full half-hour each night and pray for forgibness from them green zebra gods!

* I went with the expert who looked most like she'd be the Bionic Woman's neighbor

Suck it, Cezanne!

Green zebra #1

Here is the season's first harvestable green zebra tomato. The tomato stalks in the back yard are starting to bend with the weight of the oncoming fruit [twss].

STOKED.

Gardens, as of July 7

Check out this BROCCOLI!!!1!!1!



Also, at home, thickets o' green zebras!:

Dig it!

First green zebra is on its way!

Home rain barrel trial run!

Got the rain barrel affixed to the back of the house; now we are getting ready for thunderstorms, so we will see just how much rainwater a thunderstormy day produces!

The meshy stuff is now bungied down and doesn't look so crap as it does here, for all you angry aesthetes out there.

AND: here's a corner of the storm we are getting ready for right now!

ArmaGardenTone-eddon

Went to my fave weirdo evangelical-owned garden shop [the place with the READY FOR Y2K! stickers on the cash register] for a twenty lb bag of GardenTone. Struck up a conversation with a graying Saul Bellow-y dude, who said, tapping the bag, "That's a good product."

Me: "Yep, we loved it last year."

SB2: "Have you used the TomatoTone?"

Me [shyly]: "No..."

SB2: "Oh, it's great. The only problem is that the tomato plants grew over my garage..."

Then one of the owners rang me out and I asked them both about plucking. Saul2 said, no, he never plucked and when he was a kid, his uncle, who owned a greenhouse out in what's now Trotwood, never plucked, either, and, indeed, the tomatoes just grew over everything like kudzu.

Owner lady said her dad has always plucked, with great results.

So I was still in a quandary. I said (as earlier): How will I know I'm not plucking off the stem that could lead to a a prizewinner?

SB2: "Well, only God knows that."

Owner lady: [quiet sage nodding, as if remembering the Biblical enjoinder Be still and know that I am God]

Plucking suckers - a lesson in FEAR

When I was a kid, I went to some school seminar with some (real) smart kids about computers [alarming syntax of this sentence can serve to remind that Imperial Bedrooms is going arrive any day now!]. My problem with the 1979-era computer stuff was a simple lack of comprehension on how little blips of electricity could go around circuit boards and become, well, something. I still don't understand this, still, but with computers being omnipresent, I don't really have to understand. Those other kids, blithely writing friggin' intense if/then statements and oblivious to my dilemma were trying to teach me a lesson: It's better to not overthink.

Then, one of the times I was flunking out of college, I drunkenly thought it wise to ask my Western Civ prof something about, well, how do we know that Sodomanius the First REALLY decided to pillage Carthage on March 11, 212 BC? I just couldn't fathom that there were/are some sort of records that verified all this, and still don't. So, like Holden's paper on Egypt, I stuck my head into the lion's mouth of my ignorance. I forget what the guy said - all I remember is that the prof lived with his mom (!).

All of which is a long way of saying that I intend to pluck the sucker leaves off out tomatoes this year, but, despite all I read/youtube on this topic, no one can tell me (to my satisfaction) WHICH bits of leaf to excise or when to stop! "DON'T OVERPRUNE!" is the universal chiding adjuration...but...but...no one says exactly HOW MUCH is overpruning, nor does anyone show what a successfully pruned, fully grown plant looks like. How do I know I'm not trimming a leaf that will produce a prize-winner, goddammit???

SOMEONE HELP ME!

Seeds in, etc

Some puny starts done from seeds...

Was told that rabbits don't like forks...sounds like BULLSHIT...

Bride in "Crouching Planting Spider" yoga position (difficulty +2)

Raised beds now at full height! If you could digitally pull back a stone there, you would see crucial striations, conveying how time's accretions, zzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Random flora on the grounds!

The White City, my ass

Read The Devil in the White City recently [how 2003 of me, I know, I know], and it was great right up to the point where I stopped caring about it. Was particularly impressed by the descriptions sheer scale of the undertaking of the building of the fair, as opposed to the murder parts, which surprised me. Why would this be? I mean, building some crap is not as inherently sexy/gory as some maniac building a special house where he can do away with and skin his victims and such...

Then I realized why it fascinated: the building of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, with all its attendant snafus and massive amounts of manhours and labor, was, in some small negligible way, a sort of crude, immature forerunner to the construction of our raised garden bed! How well I understood the anguish of these architects and builders, even though their struggles with weather and time and manpower to craft their insignificant bauble on the Lake was nothing compared to what I continue to face every day. Not to mention our Banvard's Folly* of a community garden, where altruism intersects with a labor comparable to the erecting of the Pyramids, albeit with slackjawed passersby saying "Whatcha doin?"

Anyway: progress pic of backyard, with another four inches o' organic matter added! Yummy!

Proud farmer, off some Bizarro-world collective farm:

* look it up

Shoot!