50% More Tomatoes

 

As you can see, our garden is still very dry and required the hauling of many buckets of water to keep all the tomato/cabbage/kohlrabi/pepper plants alive until next week when we can get down next. As you can probably see by  the water darkened spots, we have amassed quite a collection of them. A friend of ours who plants a big garden for charitable causes ended up with way to many tomato and pepper plants and asked if we could use some. Why yes we could, especially since they were twice the size of the ones growing in our garden currently. So we planted them. I don't know how many tomato plants are now growing out there but I'm guessing it is somewhere in the order of 40 or 50 plants. Way more than we will ever need if they all grow to maturity. But why not since we have the space and perhaps we can give them away to someone in need.

Our peas aren't doing too well in the dry soil and we will be lucky to harvest much from them. The radishes in the center row are doing quite well though. The mulched plants are strawberries and do have some fruit setting on them.

The right row are our first crop of regular potatoes we planted and are looking great. The center row of onions are likewise doing well. The left row are also potato and were an experiment. They were from a seed place that is trying to breed specifically for flavor as the top priority and were fairly expensive. We planted them a couple weeks after the other row of potatoes. They too are looking good and I can't wait to taste any differences to see if they were indeed worth the price.

This picture if for Steve who asked about how the asparagus looks when we stop picking it. Here it is starting to get more feathery looking like carrots and is nearly six feet tall. This will continue to thicken up as more shoots reach the point of bolting. We still were able to pick a large handful of smaller not yet bolting asparagus for our supper that night.

Another experiment we are doing this year is trying to grow cucumbers on one have of our trellis tunnel. I haven't raised cucumbers in many years and I have never raised them in a place where they could climb so we will see what they end up going.

The many peaches on our tree our getting bigger. 

The orchard is all leafed out and everything survived the winter thus far. From the foreground back are a row of plumcots, cherries and pear trees. I'm not sure we will add more tree or not this year. Maybe later if there is a sale on leftover fruit trees.

Unlike the first two rows above, the third row actually has three trees, pear trees. This is the third pear tree. Two years ago shortly after planting, I'm guessing a large bird of some sort sat on the main branch and broke it. I lopped the remains off and hoped one of the secondary branches below would become the main branch and it did. Earlier this spring, the large bird sat on one of the other branches and broke it off. Then this past week it did it again on the new main branch and broke it off. It has really destroyed the tree but I'm leaving it as is for now in hopes it doesn't try on of our other trees and break them too. This tree will probably succumb to some sort of illness due to it's now really shattered stump of a main trunk even if one of the remaining sub branches starts growing up as the main trunk again. I wish I knew what was breaking those branches. If I can remember, maybe I'll put up my game camera again.