Heavenly Blue Morning Glories catch late afternoon sun today. After the rain last night these vines decided they’re still alive and bloomed. The Heavenly Blues are scattered across all the veranda pergolas today.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
End of garden for 2013
I have given up this year. I’m sick of watering — again. This has become a common theme from year to year. The alley vines were the worst ever this year even with my soaker hose solution. The drought conditions we’re still under since July has been devastating without some sort of drip irrigation. The tomatoes produced but the habeneros failed miserably for the first time. Sunflowers turned out to be a terrible companion plant. Eggplants did not produce much because of them. Will need to come up with a plan for next year. My main goal is to replace half the tomato containers with 7.5 cu. ft. ones. This will be a 150% increase so I’ll be able to see how container size affects growth and productivity. I did learn some things this summer so it wasn’t a total loss. Will contemplate and post a list of what to do next year and what I learned this year. Until then …
Heavenly Blue Morning Glories
Heavenly Blue morning glories bloom on veranda level. Veranda level MGs doing well. Alley level; not so well. I am considering eliminating alley level planters next Spring due to difficulty in maintenance (i.e. watering) and their lack of performance these last bunch of years. The veranda level produced nice MGs this year for a change.
Harvest on 9/1
No need for another harvest porn pic. Should have gone up yesterday. Picked about 20lbs and the squirrels got at least 5lbs (maybe more) — some ~2lb big Brandywines. I left them on the vine too long. The tomatoes are coming in too fast and I don’t feel like canning. All plants are shot but I think they produced OK to somewhat heavy. Not really sure. Next year I want to build 4 new tomato planters at 2.5’x2’x1.5′ = 7.5 cu.ft. This is 2.5x the current 3 cu.ft. planters. If I do 4 planters that’s 4.5×4=18 cu.ft. of new mix which is 5 bags of pine bark plus a TBD amount of mushroom compost. I think this will help the tomatoes last farther into September. The neighbor’s in ground tomato plants look healthy and going strong even though mine appear to have more tomatoes. There’s always next year. Thankfully I can pull these soon and retire the main roof and quit watering early this year.