So far, everything is still thriving in the greenhouse and our tomatoes are now showing some massive signs of life. Here’s a general view when you glance in the direction of the tomatoes….
As you can probably notice (click on the image to make it larger), we have lots of little tomatoes all over our plants finally. I think the drastic pruning really helped even though we probably did wait a bit too long. Next year, we won’t make that same mistake. These are the Colibri tomatoes you see above which we will definitely have an abundance of since we have somewhere around 8 of these plants. We’re hoping to serve a tray of tomatoes and mozzarella at our housewarming party and would really love to be able to use our own tomatoes for that…so we’ll see how far along they are in about two weeks time 🙂
And below are a few of the Black Krim tomatoes which have sprung up recently. We have about 5 on this plant and there are a few new ones which appeared in the last two days on another of the plants. Can’t wait until these get ripe and we can try them. They look like they’re going to be very tasty.
And here is a shot of one of the Red Zebra tomatoes which recently started producing a few new fruits. It seems that it doesn’t like to have more than two fruits on the plant at a time which I guess is an incentive to just pick them as soon as they look ripe. The two we have tried had great flavor but were very small so hopefully the trimming will help these guys to get a bit bigger than a golf ball.
Moving across the greenhouse, the cucumbers are also doing some good things. They are finally tall enough to start them growing along the top of the greenhouse on a string so we’re going to give that a try. We’ve not been very lucky with many of the fruits and they’ve usually yellowed and died long before they reached more than 2 inches in length. I read that you have male and female flowers on cucumbers (like zucchinis) and the male flower needs to pollinate the fruit on the female but I never seem to see the male flowers so I’m not really sure what is happening. But we’ll just keep our eye on things in the meantime and hope for the best I guess.
The zucchini are still flourishing and we have two large fruits on there now to compliment the one we picked on Friday already. They’re each around a foot long and a few inches in diameter, definitely our biggest yet since we finally weren’t so anxious to just eat them…now we’re just trying to figure out when we will eat them and how…
The sweet potatoes are finally starting to come back after being rather savagely attacked by the slugs which I’m very pleased about. I can only image how fantastic these are going to taste and I’m pretty excited about the final outcome here.
And finally our corn. The Jala Maize is along the back and you may notice that one of the stalks has gotten quite large. It was about at my shoulder on Sunday which would make it about 5 feet tall. There’s no corn on any of the Jala plants yet but we have 5 ears on the sweet corns even though the stalks are still tiny.
We’re going to have to be really careful with our stevia plant because it’s getting very moist right now and they don’t like that at all. The roof of our greenhouse has blown open again (it’s just plastic sheeting stapled down) so we are working out the best time to get some plastic panels to cover the roof and will leave the sides with PVC sheeting for now. This will save us some money and since the sides are fairly stable there isn’t much point in redoing everything just yet. I moved the stevia back into what I think will be a drier location and we’ll just have to hope for the best. I suppose I can just bring it inside, worst case. Otherwise it was doing very well and a few of the leaves are just about at their peak size (about 1-1.5 inches at the broadest part and 4-5 inches long). We will pick the fully grown leaves and then the plant usually begins reproducing new growth shortly after. You should likely notice little tiny leaves sprouting before you pick the big leaves anyway. You can pick the smaller ones but we can wait…
Still no eggplants although we think we have a few starting to produce finally. We’ve got lots of buds but just no fruit.
Our lettuce is also thriving in the window boxes outside. I thought that we might lose it all last week because it was above 90 degrees here and far too hot for lettuce but aside from a few wilted leaves, it did just fine. The iceberg lettuce even seemed to enjoy the heat.
And the cayenne peppers are blooming like crazy but we haven’t see any fruit yet so we’re excited for the first of those to produce.
Our two pinto bean plants are pretty sad looking and also got heavily attacked by slugs. There are hardly any leaves on them anymore but they are starting to come back.
The strawberry plants are growing like mad and spreading out in the raised bed. We’ve got a few more plants just hanging out around the yard so we are thinking that at the end of the season we will probably make one entire raised bed dedicated to strawberries…we certainly have enough room. And then we may be able to produce enough strawberries next year for strawberry wine 🙂
The watermelons are unfortunately very dead. I think the slugs were pretty rough on them and they just didn’t seem to like the cool temperatures so if we try them again next year we will definitely leave them in containers in the greenhouse.
Our peanut plants are also still hanging in there but haven’t grown more than a foot tall. I’m not really sure if they shou
ld be larger or not but at least they are still alive. The slugs really liked them as well so it was a battle for a while and we thought we would certainly lose them all…but they are quite resilient.
And I think that pretty much covers all our plants at the moment. Because of the slug infestation I tried another natural remedy to deter slugs and sprinkled some egg shells inside the plants that the slugs seemed to be favoring. In just a few days there was a noticeable impact so I will be making more eggs in the near future so I can start putting the shells in more locations!
