Back to the garden!

I have been so distracted by Disneyland I haven't had a chance to post pictures from Friday. Another zucchini failed due to missing pollination as well as the little grasshopper is still around and causing mischief.

So I'm pretty sure those tiny holes are from the little guy and again,  not going to worry about it simply because at this stage the damage is tolerable. You can also see the leaves are taking on the mature greyish markings on the leaves. The left bush is getting male and female but the right one is still all males. Hmmph.

Looks like it's been munching on the tomato as well.

The speckling on the leaf I believe is spider mites and/or thrips, sadly I didn't get a chance to use my magnifier on it but phones are so good I can zoom in on it and verify the damage but see no bugs at this point. Also saw evidence of giant whitefly surprisingly. Which I apparently forgot to get a picture of, needless to say I removed the offending leaf and a few others in pruning and stomped on them with great vigor. That is a bug that is worse than aphids to eradicate. I will have to look at the giant bird of paradise and the lemon to see if there's evidence of them there as well.

So as to the whitefly issue, they are difficult to control with just a spray because when you hit them with anything like that, the adults scatter being fliers. It does help to minimize populations by spraying the bushes every day or so but with thousands of eggs being laid at a time, you have to really be on top of it to keep it under control. There are systemic insecticides that last for a year that do help and are not passed through to the fruit but I usually reserve those for bushes and trees as the tomato will be gone in another month or two and it's not worth the money to use it on annuals.

A lesson on culling

 So when you have clusters of tomatoes in a home garden, depending on the variety, you can keep them like this and eventually have three different sized tomatoes, if they all survive, or you can cull the two smaller ones (pick them off) and then more energy will go into the larger tomato. This also reduces your harvest numbers but considering it is only me and my guy and I only eat tomatoes on salad and sandwiches (if they're really good I will just cut it and put salt and pepper on it) I can afford to reduce the number of fruit I will have. Also consider the weight of mature fruit on the branch. If you have a smaller branch and a lot of fruit you will lose all of the fruit if the branch breaks. It is a common practice on fruit trees and with vegetables is does very well for larger tomatoes. Peppers are not cluster fruiting nor are melons and squash. Tomatoes are pretty unique in that way and if you are growing cherry tomatoes, get a fence or trellis because those suckers take off and reach for the sky. Those are meant to cluster fruit but despite what we have seen in the stores and photos they don't all ripen at the same time. I want to know what variety stores get of the 'tomatoes on the vine' clusters and wonder if they are treated with gas in order to get them to all get to size and ripen at the same time. That is not how they normally grow.

Oh in the process of watering the day before yesterday I shook the plant and one of the tomatoes fell off. Smaller than the others that I picked but it would have gotten full size... sadness and dismay.  I shook it to get the water off and maybe shake some pollen also and heard a ::thump:: on the ground. Looked on the other side of the plant and there it was dangit. Smaller than the palm of my hand so all I can think is that it may have been against the cage and hit it. 

I should probably use the tomatoes and zucchini soon and the bowlful of jalapeños as well. Haven't checked the peppers on the flavor and still trying to figure out how to get larger fruit. I'm leaving them on as long as possible but then notice one or two changing color despite their size and have to pick them. Sigh. Research goes on!

Next up, another post about the plantings at Disneyland as well as garden update.