Success (again) and whatever else.

 Didn't get out to the garden yesterday, it's been cooling off so not so pressed to be there every other day to water. They did need watering today as I knew they would. I'm not going to pick anymore jalapenos, just not worth their piddly size anymore.

So another one in the chute after the one I pollinated day before yesterday. Female flower to the right of the fruiting one and then the male flower on the other bush ready to go! Also, a LOT more mildew so i did some pruning of some leaves. Just to give you an idea of how I shifted the vine over and how big these things get.

Definitely ending of the season given the production of the tomatoes and peppers is down, but the zucchini is ramping up. I do like how lush the bush is but you can also see again the difference in size between the two. You just never know really.

Something that I forgot to mention a few weeks ago was this funky branch on the Eucalyptus was wither pulled down by the neighbors or cut down. Judging from the end of it, looks like it was partially cut then pulled down. Sadness, it was a cool funky branch.

And of course it is the neighbors tree but the branch fell on our side so it was up to the guys here to take care of it. At least it didn't damage the fence.

Sad when something cool on a tree or branch has to be removed, or when an entire tree has to be removed. Always sad. Unless it's a pest type tree, then good riddance and frankly Eucalyptus are a kind of pest tree, can't grow anything  under them, drop leaves and seeds constantly, branches break off... ah well.

Speaking of sad, here is the state of the mint bed compared to when I first looked at the garden:

 

This is what happens with 'caring' for a garden can do. I honestly tried to take a cutting from there and put it in the ground but it didn't take. Mint is supposed to be a weed in the right conditions and obviously these were not the right conditions. Wonder how long that bed had been there before it died a horrid lingering nasty death.

Sigh. Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Only harvested a few small peppers, one was bright red but only about an inch long, will see how that tastes. 

Speaking of taste, time for lunch and found a waffle iron on the table which will hopefully get a test tomorrow morning. Food. Yes but not from the garden.

It's the season for fungus among us and small changes

 I didn't get out to the garden yesterday because I didn't feel like it. The plants survived and actually something different happened.

Actual digging?

I think, judging from the tools and where I last left the trowel, she just dug up everything but didn't really pull anything out. Sigh. Didn't smooth the ground over just left it all jumbled up in  mounds and divots. Her plots, her choice. The zucchini is kind of encroaching on that part so I shifted the branch out and away of the bed. Then there's this miracle of nature:

 

 

A male flower is actually open and at the same stage as a fruiting flower! Jumped on that and got her pollinated because I don't trust nature anymore.

I think that might be the last one though because with the change in the weather, cooling down during the day and the night, it is mildew season!

This was taken just after 10 am. You can see the shade is pretty much covering the bed now and the very evident spots of powdery mildew. People always complain about this and how to stop it, yadda yadaa. Well I'm  not going to go out and get an arsenal of sprays just to take care of this simply because it is going to be a constant for the next month and then it's done. 

There are plenty of flowers coming on and even a few more fruit buds but meh. I think I'll just let it run its course and start planning for next season. One last tomato as well, and the two small ones that were at the bottom of the plant were knocked down. Either by the hose or weight the branch broke at the joint with the main plant so I threw it on the 'compost pile'. 

The tomato still was green on top and had cracking of course. I was going to leave it for another day but when I felt it, the bottom was just starting to get soft so I decided to pick it.
 

#tomatoes

Let's face it, I'm a lazy gardener. If I had a bigger kitchen I would be more inclined to cook with what I've harvested. I planted what veggies I usually am good with eating and even then I have used three of the eight or so I've picked. Used one of the four or five zucchini and none of the peppers. The three major factors are: tiny kitchen, my own lazy nature and it was too blasted hot!

I will likely plant peas in the tomato bed and greens in the other. Just because of the shade issue. Peas can get mildew as well and I'll see about finding a bush variety. Yes, there are bush peas meant to be grown in containers. Can't beat a tall vine type of course but have to go with what can grow. Oh yeah, peas, carrots, radishes, lettuce, cilantro... all that stuff. Smallish plants that can be crowded into a bed. Still need tons and tons of compost and fertilizer to make it better than it is now. I'm anxious to see what the readings are after it gets amended next time.

One bird I look forward to every year since I was at the nursery is the little black capped Phoebe. They are flycatchers and usually swoop under eaves and in trees and bushes to grab spiders as well as snatching flies and gnats out of the air. 

 Beak to tail tip they are just under 7" and have a high pitched single chirp. I saw one dive under an awning and grab a black widow from it's corner, land on the pavement and beat the tar out of it before swallowing it whole. They'll swoop out over the lawn to catch a fly then go back to it's viewing perch. They usually like to hang out near water for obvious reasons: Mosquitos and gnats. They build a nest similar to swallows, tucked under eaves and rooflines glued to the surface with spit and cobwebs.

Not very colorful but fun to watch and a sign that fall is on the way. I have yet to see a robin, that I recall, in San Diego since I got here almost thirty years ago. I've seen bluebirds, phoebe, doves which, by the way, have not been seen since spring and when I went to Julian I heard and saw some scrub and actual blue jays. The canyons are full of them as well as woodpeckers of some sort. Last time I saw a robin in person that I recall was in San Jose when I was in high school and they flew through just few days before there was a freak snowfall that melted before I got to school.

That's about it today. Birds, changes in weather, all good for now.

Watering, passing time, #zucchini

 I think this is mentally the hardest part of gardening. Just passing time while things ripen and watching plants age every day. Zucchini likely will miss a pollinating window oh and I trimmed it back a little, odd plant that.

That hole in the middle was a smaller clump of growth that really wasn't doing anything. A few flowers but that's about it. That shade is what it is getting from about 11 am on. Have to try and get out there earlier in the morning and see how much sun it's getting. Literally the sun is setting on this plant hahah!

Latest of the #tomatoes on the shady side of the bush, lots of flowers and some small tiny fruit coming on, only saving on this is they are still in the sun. Zucchini I think is going to come out soon so I can start fall stuff that likes warm shade.

Oh and someone was repotting something and saw where my leaf pile is and decided to dump it there. Well then, good start to a compost pile for sure!

Didn't notice until I was watering

 

I'll mix it up eventually, got soil, dry and green ingredients, it's a good start. Not too many topics have come up lately to talk about. I think the summer heat has baked my brains too much and can't pull a topic out. One small thing though, there are a ton of weeds in that corner as well and my brain said, 'hey, free compost material' my knowledge kicked that to the curb, 'no you don't want potential seeds in a compost pile to spread all through a garden.' So there is that topic. Be careful of what you put in a compost pile or bin. No protein based things like fat or meat (yikes!) bones are good but need to be clean and crushed (calcium!) weeds are okay as long as there are no products sprayed on them or diseases and evident seeds. Kitchen scraps, thoroughly shredded paper with no shiny paper or colored ink (trivia, some newspapers now use soy ink so it's safe to put in compost!), small bits of bark, wood, green stuff all that is good.

I think I covered #composting before so won't go into it again, the information is out there on the internet in many many forms so go for it!

I am not the end all and be all of garden info just doing this as a hobby and spreading what little knowledge I have. I feel it slipping away every day though and it saddens me that almost a half lifetime of a career was all 'use it or lose it' and it's on the downslope of losing it now. Without having it in front of me 8/5 (8 hours a day 5 days a week) to keep it fresh my rolodex of plant knowledge is losing cards.

Such is life and aging and all that jazz. 

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.

Some forgotten details and ending season

 I took pictures of my 'compost pile' and forgot to talk about it. There's several different  methods of composting, the lazy way and the working way are the major divisions. This is the lazy way.

You can dig a hole or not and just start piling cuttings, leftover bits and stuff and let it sit. Water it down occasionally (as I've been doing) and just let it decompose on it's own. Lazy, takes longer for it to break down (sometimes years) and no guarantee of viability. I didn't want to cart the leaves and clippings all the way across the complex to the dumpster so here it is. If I was really next step more ambitious I would use some of the tomato cages to create a frame of sorts. Nah. 

I picked two tomatoes today that were really cracking and figured they wouldn't get much bigger anyway. Test how ready they are by tugging firmly on the tomato, if it breaks off it's ready, if you have to put more effort into it then it's not ready. These, despite coloring, came off easily.

The two in front are from today but you can see how badly the heat is affecting them. I have two more that are on the shady side of the bush that are going to be closer to regular size and show no signs of cracking so far, but it's early yet. Barely coloring on the bigger one (didn't get a picture)

It is now 84 degrees at 11 am and this weather pattern will continue to the weekend. Yuck.

There are a few itty bitty zucchini coming on but again, whether they get pollinated is chancy, stupid bushes. Those are also getting more mildew spots due to it being shadier now for them, humid and warmer. Prime conditions for powdery mildew. Do I care? Not this late in the season, which by the way, late summer and fall is fungus season! Yes indeed, all those images we remember for depicting fall, mushrooms, orange leaves, spiders, yep that's all for a reason.

And of course the tomato bush is showing signs of winding down as well.

Nothing to see here folks, perfectly normal yellowing, could be something but again, this late in the season I'm not going to worry about it. There are also tons of flowers coming in on the tips of the upper growth. Not going to worry about it right now really, this is a first year garden and I know now to put the zucchini over here and the peppers in the other bed, tomatoes can go anywhere but hope another bed opens up by next spring.

The cilantro didn't survive sadly it got baked really bad and not sure the bell peppers are going to come up either, experiments rarely turn out successful the first time. So another sign of late summer/fall are different bugs. This one is an oleander bug.

It's got it's wings open and was walking up the fence, since I was walking Rocky it was difficult to get my phone out and take a picture one handed and in focus. I had to adjust this a great deal just to see it in the photo. Again, nothing to worry about with this one, they are seed eaters and show up when the oleander starts putting on seed pods. It usually look like this:

And on that note, things to do today so that's going to wrap it up for now.

Hawks, a tomato and other stuff

 The hawks have returned. There is a Eucalyptus citrinus (Lemon Scented Eucalyptus) on the other side of the back fence that has a nest waaaaayy up in the topmost branches. This particular type of Eucalyptus isn't very full and bushy so the branches tend to look more Dr. Suessian with the leaves all clustered to the ends and droopy. Very nice tree but back on point, there is a nest up there that I originally thought was a hawk nest but when the hawks went away the crows/ravens (still can't keep them straight) seemed to have moved in.

So now that the hawks are back I suspect it is their nest and the crows were taking advantage of a dead chick maybe? From what I've researched it's probably a Red Shouldered Hawk and last year it was a pair so hoping they're coming back to the same nest again. As much as they are a top predator and people complain they kill birds, rabbits and mice...excuse me..what would you rather have in your backyard? Birds know to sit in a tree and be quiet if they know there's a hawk around, the mice and rabbits, snakes too, are mostly evening/daytime foragers. Natural pest control.

Now on to the garden. speaking of shoulders, the tomatoes are still cracking on the tops (called the shoulder) and you can see in the pictures it still shows a little green. From what I remember this is, believe it or not, sunburn on a tomato.

Still tasty, just have to cut the top part off. It looks like a hole on the top right one but that's just the stem part left over after I tried to pull it off just tugging on the sepals (the green collar leaves).

I decided not to water because it was cooler this morning but will try and get out there in the evening. The zucchini is still growing thankfully and an example of how the male flowers are taller to catch the pollinators for the infant female flower below.

Still growing good!

It is very obvious the male flower will open long before the female flower. This is on the right hand, smaller bush so I may even cut some of the leaves away to make room for it. Need to find a tiny container and get my paint brush out to collect the pollen when it opens. I looked it up and the pollen can be good for up to a month. Need to find out if I should keep it cold or just cool somewhere. 

This certainly has been an adventure in vegetable gardening. Wish I had the space and supplies to do more justice for veggies. Fall is coming so we will see what happens. I think for sure I'm going to harvest what I can from the jalapeños then yank it. It isn't doing very good, wilting in the morning after only a few hours of sun. Green as all get out but the fruit is puny. Need to bulk up the nutrients ore my bell peppers are going to suffer the same fate.

It's going to be hot again today with a trend of cooling down over the next week. Still insufferable in the middle of the day. Time to go do errands, grab lunch and scoot on home with AC and fans.

Quick post but not much to update

First, the weather report:

 

So if you don't have anything done by noon, fuhgeddaboudit. We're already buttoning up and will start the ac before we do our short errand for today.

Tomatoes are almost ready, a zucchini is still an infant but looks like it is viable and a gift from above.

Not quite ready

A tiny one behind this one

The days are getting shorter, the shadows are shifting so the zucchini bed is now getting half shaded by now. I don't have to water that bed as often as I thought due to so many leaves shading it and now more shade from the wall. The tomato/pepper bed on the other hand... the leaves didn't do much to shade the soil.

After uncovering

Before uncovering

Not much difference in the soil moisture sadly so watered this bed and you can see that here it was 10:30 am and the sun was blazing hot and plants were wilted despite being watered yesterday. I pulled away the leaves and tossed them over on the makeshift 'compost' pile. Didn't bother checking the peppers, most of them are still too small. 

I have discovered three new mosquito bites so that little twit of a bug yesterday wasn't the only one. Grrrrr.

I am looking forward to cooler days enough that I don't feel like I've run around the building when I come back in from gardening. That dry dusty clay soil is going to be a slick muddy mess when it really rains. Need to look into gravel or something with permission.

And on to the gift from above, I told you we have parrots:

 Lovely iridescent green body feather just happened to be hanging out on the tomato plant. Tiny thing no bigger than my fingernail but it made me smile. Hoping to get some fertilizer today and give them all one last boost of the season. Budget is going to be tight after the next two weeks due to extra money dropping off. Again that is another story but it does affect what I do and get for the garden in regard to more important things. 

 

Stay cool and trust in science.