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| LAST SUMMERS BUST! |
Paul and I made a commitment to blog last year and boy did we drop the ball!! Let's start over. Last year I was going to share our organic gardening experience— It was a BUST!! Record temperatures starting in May and lasting through October. Usually it is just July and August that are upper 90ties but not 2011– Tough summer! Even with watering our plants and keeping them lush we only had a dozen or so cucumbers and that was it! (we did have plenty of figs). Did you know tomatoes self-pollinate? If it is too hot the male parts are too sticky and don't fertilize the female parts so no baby tomatoes.
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| Out SUCCESSFUL Indoor Experiment! |
Then fall came and we saw a flower on out pepper plant in October. Crazy! I also had an indoor experiment going on in our sun porch. We had a heirloom tomato plant and a bell pepper plant. IN October the indoor pepper plant started flowering too. As slow as they grew, we ended up with FIVE delicious, organic, homegrown peppers in March. A year after the plant was started from seed! The tomato plant kept growing and flowering and growing an flowering. I had it all rigged up with strings across the room. I cut back non-flowering sections of plant. We ran a heater to keep it just warm enough on cold nights —again for sake of our experiment. It only produced ity-bity tomatoes. Tasted perfect but it's not a cherry tomato plant! I want that giant slicing tomato! Paul kept telling me the windows have UV coating and the proper sunlight isn't getting through. I told him to leave my experiment alone. It would warm up son enough. And it did!! Last month Paul dragged the container outside. Slowly but surely the yellow leaves started turning green. In the glorious sunlight the leaves ALL turned to a dark rich green, flowering and a few baby tomatoes!
We also made some drastic changes to our backyard this winter. We cut down three 15 yr old trees so we could plant our edible forest (more to come on this). The weather has been beautiful. So much so that we are getting in a crop of Swiss chard, spinach and arugula before the temperatures rise. We can plant another crop come fall. We've been enjoying our own strawberries while waiting for the blueberries and mulberries to ripen. The Figs are starting and the raspberry plants are multiplying. We have loquat trees, pomegranate, plum and apple too. We even have kiwis! We shall see how everything does. Our veggies are growing too. Bell peppers and tomatoes, of several varieties, are growing strong. Carrots, green beans, cucumbers, zucchini and herbs are growing strong. We're hoping for great things this summer. Follow along!
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| Last years yard with Fig Tree |
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| This years yard. Same Fig Tree...filling itself in! |
