Summer of rain and shine: A tribute to the fallen

Well, to be more accurate, it has been the summer where our poor vegie patch has been scorched and drowned, often in the same week. Back in late spring I was happily raising seedlings and anticipating a summer where our kitchen would be overflowing with produce. Sadly, like many fellow gardeners I've spoken to lately, much of our patch simply didn't survive the scorching hot days, followed by torrential rain, with mould, mildew, and disease inducing humidity in between.

So a tribute to the fallen of the Summer of 2009/2010...

Potatoes

Remember the great potato patch we made back in September? From strong beginnings the plants then seemed to suddenly wilt and die. I suspect either potato blight or black leg. After a while we decided to excavate and see what had happened. Many of the spuds had started well, but the heavy rain had compacted the sugar cane mulch and compost into a thick, wet, rotting layer and anything above that layer died. Our yield was a handful of small deformed potatoes.

However, on the upside, the potatoes that were voluntarily growing in the compost heap seemed to be unaffected and yielded a good number of decent sized spuds. And while some of the ones from the main patch weren't edible, they were possibly the rudest looking potatoes ever grown, so we got some giggles.

Tomatoes
Back in October I had started planting tomato seeds and by early November I had so many seedlings I was giving the excess away to family, friends and anyone who happened to drive past. Later in November saw us going on holidays for a week, during which we had several absolute scorchers and I came home to some rather scalded and sorry looking tomato seedlings. Still, we planted them out and thought they might just come good, only to have them drowned in rains, scorched again and getting every tomato affliction under the sun. A number have rust, much of the fruit has blossom end rot from the erratic rain, a lot of fruit has simply split or rotted while still green, and to top it off we've got fruit fly. I've tried spraying a Bordeaux mix to see if that helps with the rust. We've had a few good, if small, tomatoes from what I think is a Red Tommy Toe. Sadly, I think what I need to do is pull them all out to try and stop disease spreading further.

Capsicums
We had 4-5 mini capsicum plants and 2 regular size plants. They've been strong and early on had lots of flowers and fruit developing, but the insane weather has meant that most of the fruit are rotting before they're ripe. We have managed to get a couple of very cute mini capsicums, but don't hold much hope for the rest in this humid weather.


Corn
I really thought the corn was going to be alright. Sadly, the humid weather isn't great for corn either. A lot of the cobs had aphids and some kind of borer. The ones that looked okay were very disappointing to eat. They tasted like glue - bland and starchy. I don't know whether we didn't have enough of them to get good pollination or there was some nutrient deficiency, or both.

Cucumber
There is one lone apple cucumber that has survived against the odds. Two plants were lost when the dogs got into the patch and had a bit of a rampage. The other one succumbed to the rampant powder mildew that threatened to cover every curcubit in sight. Diligent spraying with diluted milk seems to have saved my lone survivor and we even got a decent sized and quite edible cucumber from it.

Rhubarb
The rhubarb grew to epic proportions with massive leaves and thick stalks. However, in the last few weeks, I think the rain and humidity has taken its toll as many of the stalks became rotten and I think the crowns may actually have rot from being too wet for too long. This is the first time I've grown rhubarb so I don't know if they're meant to die back at the end of summer or whether this is actually crown rot. There are still some new green stalks emerging from one so I'm hoping it will hang in there.

However, it hasn't all been bad and in many ways we've learnt a lot from those plants that didn't make it.

Free Tomatoes

This year's tomato raising resulted in around 90-100 seedlings. Around two weeks ago, natural attrition had reduced this to 86 seedlings. I planned to only keep around 10 for our plot, so 70+ seedlings needed to find new homes.

• 14 plants went to Dad
• 10 or so were set aside for friends
  
• 16 where swapped at the Community Garden Vegie Swap (I took along 44 and brought home the excess)

A stock take revealed I still had 28 plants I didn't want to keep. The solution? Put them out the front with a sign saying "Free Tomatoes" and see if anyone will take them.
Sign writing credit goes to the Cunning Plans Dept who thought it might be wise to put some kind of limit to remind people that taking all of the seedlings at once may be greedy (trying to encourage community sharing etc..). We also made sure that the boxes we put them in were old cardboard boxes we wouldn't miss if they were taken or damaged.

We put the seedlings out on Saturday 31st, thinking that perhaps if there was anyone out trick or treating for Halloween they may wish to add some tomatoes to their booty. By Sunday evening, 4 seedlings had gone. When we got up on Monday morning and went out, the whole lot had gone. Boxes and all. At least they left the sign!

While the point of putting of the tomatoes out the front was to give them away, I'm a little disappointed that someone took 24 seedlings, and the boxes, in one go. I'd like to think it was an enthusiastic gardener, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is more likely someone who will probably try and sell them at the markets to make a quick buck. I guess even then they'd still eventually end up in someones garden.

Tomato seedlings

I just counted 86 tomato seedlings on my front doorstep. This is actually less than was planted due to a bit of natural attrition.

I am resolved to only plant 6-8 tomato plants in the vegie patch this year (10 at the most), partly due to space limitation and partly so we're not drowning in tomatoes in a few months. So why do I have so many seedlings? A few reasons:

1. I'm giving some to family and friends who didn't have time for raising from seed.
   
2. I have a number of different varieties (mostly heirloom varieties) and loads of seed
3. I knew some would either die or be a bit pathetic and this allows me to pick the healthiest looking ones.

The excess seedlings are not going to waste though. Once I've sorted through the seedlings and picked the ones I'm going to plant and set aside some for family and friends, the rest are going to the Waste Not! Vegie Swap tomorrow.

This year I'm following Peter Cundle's advice and being very cruel to my tomato seedlings. He recommends planting them into small tumbler sized containers (or put several in a punnet) and only giving them enough water to stay barely alive. Apparently this will make for tough plants. Molly-coddling is expressively forbidden.

I've planted mine into yogurt pots and a few 3-4 to a punnet/round chinese container. I sprinkled a little sulphate of potash around them, as recommended, and I've been trying to only water them when they are dry or starting to wilt a bit. I must admit that being cruel to my tomatoes does feel slightly counter intuitive, but hopefully the reward will be nice sturdy plants that produce loads of fruit. I'm holding off on planting them out until they start to show signs of flowering, though at the rate they're going this could be a while yet.

Looking back through my photos from this time last year, it was about this time that we bought a couple of tomato seedlings, which then put on a huge amount of growth through November. The photo above was taken mid November last year showing the first fruit forming.

Vegie patch - now with soil!

While I know it seems a rather obvious statement that a vegie patch has soil, but up until a week or so ago, mine didn't. There was not enough dirt from the terracing to fill the beds and what was there was mostly clay and rock. The gypsum had worked a treat on the clay, but I simply needed more soil and the compost heap isn't THAT big.

So the Cunning Plans Dept went and got a truckload of soil, which was dumped on our front lawn. This needed to be moved down to the back yard. Given my feebleness it was fortuitous that my brother needed some extra cash in hand and was willing and able to do some manual labour. So he and the CPD spent a day using a small tipper to load soil into the trailer, attach trailer to tipper, drive down the neighbours driveway to the side fence of our backyard (after removing a panel of fence), dump soil into our yard, repeat. Once all the soil was moved to our back yard, the tipper was then used to transport soil to the vegie patch beds.

They also got the mulched the dead tree branches that had become overgrown with grass and weeds from sitting in a heap for so long. Plus some mowing and edging and the back yard is actually looking not to bad.

Now all that needs to be done is the edging of the ends of the beds, putting down plastic and gravel for the walkways and we'll be ready to start transplanting some of the potted vegies. I've drawn up the plans for the four beds. One will be for perennials (strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and garlic) and the other three will be annuals with rotating crops.

Meanwhile, vegie patch mkI is going berserk!

The corn have flowered and the first ears are starting to grow. Broccoli is getting huge, but no heads yet. There are bloody cabbage white butterflies everywhere and the leaves are riddled with holes, but they still seem to be growing okay. Carrots are still going well. The bonus compost potatoes and tomatoes are also growing fine.

We've also picked our first tomatoes! Some had a bit of blossom end rot, but that didn't really affect them. Nice and tasty and so red in the middle that the shop bought tomatoes literally pale in comparison. The tomato plants themselves have started to get yellowing in the leaves. I looked up some gardening books and google, but there are a apparently a lot of things that could cause yellowing of leaves ranging from the harmless, don't worry about it, to all is lost, please destroy your plant and the soil it grew in. They still seem to be growing okay and the fruit is ripening, so I'm just going to see what happens.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

Okay, I think I can officially say now that I have an abundance of tomato plants. The rouge de marmande and roma tomato plants in the big pot are rapidly becoming too big for that pot and fruiting like crazy.

The two remaining tiny tim tomatoes (one was gifted to a friend) are starting to fruit, even the one that suffered an accident and the main stem snapped. Two of the three tomatoes grown from seed saved from a shop bought tomato are going strong and starting to flower. The other one was a bit of a runt and has been planted into the front garden to give it one last chance. The riesenstraube seedlings are in desperate need of transplanting and I planted three of them out today.

Plus, when I planted out the marjoram and thyme into the front garden I brought up a couple of buckets of compost to dig in before I planted them. I now have eleven (!) tomato plants growing amongst the marjoram and thyme. I think they may have to go as that's not really the best spot for them and I have no idea what sort of tomato they are.

Tomato plant tally: 16 regular size, 9 tiny size. Anyone want some tomato plants?

Today involved planting out a number of seedlings and discover that I am running out of places to plant them as we still haven't finished the vegie patch in the back yard. We need to get a trailer load of dirt to build up the beds, plus I thinking of doing the layers of wet newspaper thing to kill of the remaining kikuyu. Seedlings transplanted included: marigolds, borage, basil, coriander, parsley, and riesenstraube tomatoes. There are a lot in the seedling trays as I ran out of potting mix.

I've also got a good number of sunflowers growing in the front garden. The first lot of seeds didn't have a good success rate with only two strong seedlings. The second lot has been more successful. There are now 8 of them plants in two rows in the front garden.
They should grow to about 120cm tall (short variety) which is just above the lattice. In the photo you can see the little wind breaks the CPD very kindly erected when we had strong winds the other weekend.

And in breaking news, the Cunning Plans Dept has just come in with the first carrot of the season. It's just a bit bigger than "baby carrot" sized and seems to have grown straight. I was a bit worried that where we planted them might not be soft enough for them to grow straight (oh okay I confess I was secretly hoping for a bifurcated carrot). Tasted a little bit bitter though. Wonder if I need to add some fertiliser or something. They've just had compost and worm wee so far. The broccoli and corn are still going well, but no sign of broccoli heads or corn ears yet.