Just passing time and the doldrums of late summer

 The pepper is still wilting by the time I get out there after 10 am due to the heat. The zucchini plants are just spreading out like crazy and still not a whole lot of fruit coming in. Haven't cooked the last three and need to do that asap. As much as I love zucchini I don't have a family of five and a full on kitchen to do proper cooking, and don't really want to heat up the oven when it's already 82 inside. I suppose I could leave them out on the table for people to take but reluctant due to the heat.

So this comes back to 'what do you want to eat?' when planting a vegetable garden. Peas I can eat, you get more of those per fruit than a zucchini. Beans yes, both of those can be frozen without any problem. Zucchini has a lot of water in it like cucumber so makes it harder to freeze without damage. As for winter crops like peas, there's all the root crops but the soil needs to be 'just right' in many different ways to be successful with them. 

Speaking of soil, when I first looked at the bed I wondered why the person who had it before just left the compost on top. Welll that's not exactly the way it happened. The compost isn't getting dug deep enough and is floating to the top and washing to the front of the bed.

That's also a picture of two small tomatoes growing on a branch close to the bottom. But you can see the compost is piling up due to watering and the angle of the soil away from the building. So when this gets finished i'll dig it in again, throw more fertilizer on it and dig it in even more. That is the sunnier bed so likely will do oh maybe root crops there, peas could certainly improve the soil. May just take some pea seeds and throw them behind the zucchini actually since that's mostly shade now.

Next #tomatoes

This one is almost ready but you can see the green on the top. I'm having to use the tree stake to hold up the branch so it doesn't break. There are small 'corky lesions' all over it and am hoping that it doesn't split like the others. I watered today again even though I watered yesterday, because it is so flaming hot and I dug with the trowel around the plants a few places and not enough water in the soil to last the whole day.

 

    And flowering to beat the band as they say. Here's some reasons why it seems to be going gangbusters now. It is sensing imminent death, as I pointed out in an earlier photo, when plants sense a threat to their continuing situation the go into survival mode, 'we're going to die make fruit to continue the species!'. That happens with fruit trees as well as other plants. A wonderful story that I heard was a coworker went to a friends orchard to see why the trees at the end of the rows weren't doing as well. They tested the soil, checked the watering, everything was good, the consultant said 'threaten it'. Say what? Yeah, threaten it, take a baseball bat to the trunk and make it think it's going to die. Well, as funny as that sounds, that's what they did, not enough to damage it just to make it feel threatened. The orchard owner called him up the following year and said those trees were doing as well as if not better than the rest of the trees. Go figure.

The days are shortening and the heat is increasing, it's finishing up it's cycle which is another form of 'abandon ship' tactic. Unfortunately all those flowers at the very tip of the branches may get pollinated but the branches are so weak and flimsy they will either put on small fruit like the last batch or break the stems under the weight (see previous picture of the larger tomatoes I had to prop up).     

    This is a situation some gardeners don't understand, it's called culling. In order to give more energy to more fruit you need to pick smaller, less well placed fruit or if you  have a very young plant that doesn't have a root system completely developed and needs to save it's energy to grow. 

    I told a customer to do that for the health of the plant, they came back about six months later wondering why their fruit weren't big enough or it wasn't looking good (it was a lemon tree). Turns out they didn't have the heart to pick most of the fruit off and the plant suffered for it and oh they didn't give it any fertilizer either, just the soil they planted it in. Leaves were yellowing, some dropping off, the fruit wasn't coming in but it was trying to flower... yeah it does that.

The analogies I give are like a brood mare or a puppy mill. They breed and breed without giving the mother a rest and both the subsequent offspring and the mother suffer. Another analogy that a former coworker used is, 'your fruit tree is like a teenager, just because it can reproduce doesn't mean it's a good idea'.

So I may well see what develops in this case and continue to wait for cooler weather...eventually...any week now....

Anyway, that's all the pictures I have today. Still flaming hot and breezy which isn't a good thing necessarily as it's a hot wind. This weather is supposed to last until mid next week. Bleh.