How is your garden doing?
Lindsey Nair / The Roanoke Times
We finally got our first ripe tomato — this little Black Cherry. It may be small, but it packed a ton of flavor! And I guess it’s healthier to have a salad with a cherry on top than a sundae with a cherry on top.
Poor Karen Hager, our gardening columnist, lost most of her garden when a big tree fell on it during the hell-storm of June 29. I was so sorry to hear that, knowing how much hard work she put into it. A lot of people (myself included, probably), would throw in the towel for the year, but not Karen. She’s putting in new plants and hoping to get some good produce out of them before the season ends.
I am eager to see if my Better Boys and Lemon Boys ripen soon. It seems if I don’t get blossom-end rot, then I wait forever to see the first blush of pink or yellow on my fruits. But I shall be patient!
I’d love to hear about how your gardens are doing. If you’ve been getting ripe veggies already, have you discovered any new ways to prepare them or are you enjoying them in your old favorite ways? Reading Crooked Road’s comment about tomato sandwiches on Karen’s blog made my mouth water. I’m ready for one of those for sure!
Send me any produce pictures you want at lindsey.nair@roanoke.com, especially if they are particularly lovely specimens or particularly funny deformed specimens (such as this tomato baby submitted by reader Deborah Combs, click “read more”). I’d love to share some more on the blog.
Photo submitted by Deborah Combs.
July 11, 2012 - 5:38 AM
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Deb Combs knows how to grow tomatoes that put Cabbage Patch Dolls to shame, in terms of ‘cuteness’!
It’s funny, my parents used to plant a couple dozen tomato plants annually, and harvest (seemingly) tons of tomatoes, most to be canned as sliced/quartered to be used during the next twelve months in sauces, or just as a ‘side’. We ate some tomato sandwiches, but not that many. We had Big Boy, Better Boy, and all the rest were heirloom plants. Only a couple of plants that were Roma or Cherry tomatoes, interestingly enough.
Somehow, that experience makes tomato sandwiches one of my top five most delectable food experiences ever.
The chase for great tomatoes seems so elusive. I raise them every year, only to middling results. I never have a ‘bountiful harvest’. I always do… okay. Sort of a C+ grade, if I were back in elementary school.
Mostly, I rely on my farmers’ market, where professionals feed my needs and desires for the perfect tomatoes.
I never waver in my faith of trying, though. With the drought, my crop this year is already pretty wane. Nonetheless, my friends at the farmers’ market like to see me coming, ha ha ha…
My Cherokee Purple plants have about 6 or 7 tomatoes on them about softball size but they aren’t quite ready to turn yet. They are in 5 gal. buckets and doing quite well considering they got tossed by the storm last week! Can’t wait for tomato sandwiches!
We’ve had to toss a few cucumbers because the heat was too much for them, but for nearly everyone we’ve tossed we’ve been able to clip off a ripe one. Not enough to pickle and can yet, so I’m doing quick kimchis with them (combining with other produce from the farmers market). Our tomatoes are finally starting to come in, along with some banana peppers. I’m ready for my first canning experience using homegrown tomatoes!
Surprisingly my lettuce didn’t bolt until the last day or two of the heat wave. Tomato and pepper plants are starting to bear fruit, and the melon/pumpkin plants are in heaven, we should have a great crop this year.
Mine survived the heat, but then some baby deer snuck in and ate the flowers off half my sunflowers and the leaves off half my zucchini plants! Hopefully the other ones will produce more to make up for it.
I’ve had some sort of critter in my garden, too. Fortunately it hasn’t done too much damage but I have found a couple of green tomatoes on the ground with a bite taken out of them. I think it’s a groundhog. I’ve had groundhog problems before.
If it isn’t the weather, it’s animals or bugs or some kind of fungus. I guess going through all that hard work is what makes them taste so much better in the end!
I have a ton of small green tomatoes on my plants so far but none are big enough to pick yet except for one. I was able to get one squash on Sunday but no more have come around. The stalks are so thick and heavy, I’ve had to prop the plant up. I tied them up an hour before the “derecho” storm last week and it survived! My cucumbers are being eaten by some sort of bug or fungus but I haven’t been able to figure out which yet. I’m thinking we’ll have tons of tomatoes and a tiny bit of everything else.
Cucumber beetles took out my squash, Kim. I fought them for a while but then just gave up. I read that they cause damage in two ways: by eating the plant and by introducing a disease.
Here’s a crazy idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if gardening columnist Karen Hager started a garden on The Roanoke Times / roanoke.com building’s rooftop “garden”? (It’s a vast, sunny space with an amazing view from downtown Roanoke… but no life!)
Awwww I love that mutant baby tomato.
We have 7 better boy plants and six supersonics. And three jalapeno pepper plants. We actually picked our first ripe tomato on July 2nd, and have probably picked 20-25 more since then. They are good! But I’m afraid the heat has negatively affected all of the plants. There are no new tomatoes coming at the tops of the plants and I’m concerned that the first run of fruit may be the only. Same thing happened last year in the heat we suffered through then. The year before that, though, we supplied at least 10 people/families w/ tomatoes all summer!
Oh, forgot to say, we’ve had tomato hornworms this year, I’ve seen three of them. And I’ve sprayed my plants since seeing them so hopefully they are gone! Those things are some of the ugliest creatures I’ve ever seen! And they have a voracious appetite for tomato plants, eat the whole top out of them!
Dennis, my dad says tomato hornworms are easier to spot in the dark with a flashlight. I don’t know why, but he seems to grow a lot of good tomatoes.
Lindsey, have you ever tried fried squash blossoms? I’ve wanted to try making that dish and have never done so, but i have a bunch of useless squash blossoms and I’d like to get something out of them.
On another fried note….last week I tried dredging oysters in hush puppy mix and frying them….a great success we’ll we repeating.
I have never had enough squash blossoms to try that Kristen but I have always wanted to. There is a recipe for stuffed fried blossoms in the plateup database.
Wow Lindsey I just printed it. LOVE Tony Pope’s food, and as we’re buried in heirloom tomatoes these days, it’s perfect.
The only things that have done well this year are my Blue Lake green beans and lettuce. The beans grew well last year, and seem rather impervious to pests and produce tasty beans. Like Tass, my lettuce only started to turn in the last days of the heat wave, and I was surprised that it lasted that long. We still have some leaves, but they are brown around the edges and not very attractive.
I have 4 Roma tomato plants and have only been able to get 2 tomatoes so far. I’ve lost several to blossom end rot, and I am not sure what I’m doing wrong. I have basil planted with the tomatoes, and the basil is looking great. We’ve been using quite a bit of it lately.
@Lori, I had problems with blossom end rot the first couple years I planted tomatoes. My dad told me to sprinkle some garden lime around the base of the plants. I did it and it seemed to work for me.
@Kristen, let me know how they turn out! The look labor-intensive but tasty.
For a couple of years, my little garden kept having what I thought was tomato blight. While buying tomatoes at a local store, the clerk mentioned that she thought I had my own plants. When I explained that I was having problems with blight/end rot, she told me that a gardening book she had read said that it was caused by lack of calcium. I crushed some calcium pills AND some Tums, dissolved them in water, then watered the plants. It was amazing what a difference it made – within two days, the plants perked up and the tomatoes that hadn’t been affected were gorgeous! Now I add calcium about every third time I do the epsom salts watering.
@Vickie, agricultural lime’s active ingredient is calcium carbonate. So we were probably doing essentially the same thing for our plants.
Thanks, Lindsey! I’ll give that a try.
And Vickie, too!! I like your ingenuity!
We went a little crazy when plant-shopping this year. We kept the squash and zucchini down to a managable number, and have a good number of cukes and beans, but when we saw the tomatoes, grabbed anything that looked good. We ended up with 57 plants…for a family of four! I guess I will be putting the canner to good use this year
My husband always grows at least 50 tomato plants. This year is no exception. Except for the fact that I bought most of the plants this year. My favorite are San Marzano. The first year I planted them they were big and meaty and made the best sauce. But, for the last 3 years they haven’t done well. I found a new place to buy them and the big meaty tomatoes are back. I also found a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes there as well and they are all doing great. So far I have canned 7 qts of tomatoes and 2 1/2 qts of sauce. More tomatoes to come.
My husband also goes crazy with the tomato plants. I’ve canned 5 quarts, 9 pints of salsa and ended up with more than I had jars for, so froze a couple of quarts too. And, then, the next day picked about twice as many tomatoes. I also froze several gallons of green beans and several quarts of squash and zucchini. The good thing is, he also plants me tons of flowers. Zinnias are beautiful this year.