Fall Tomato Plants are Planted

Although it has been a bit of two steps forward and one step back, we continue to make progress towards our fall garden. 

New cantaloupe plants.  After the rabbits (or something) ate the first two cantaloupe seedlings, I planted two more cantaloupe seeds.  However, this time I covered the seedlings with an old metal wire shelf that we had lying around and not being used.  It is actually two shelves zip tied together and fastened down with garden staples.  The plan is to leave this in place until the plants are larger and hopefully less susceptible to rabbit attack.  Presumably young seedlings and tender leafy plants such as lettuce will be of more interest to the rabbits than larger cantaloupe vines.

I still do not have definitive proof that it was the rabbits that ate the plants, but I certainly have lots of circumstantial evidence.  One evening I went out after dinner to check on the plants and was nearly scared to death when a rabbit went running past me from the plants behind the bench.  Yes, I am sure he may have been more scared than me, but he did not act like it.  He stopped and turned around to look at me.  His attitude was more that of  "why are you here bothering me?".

The good news is that the new cantaloupe seeds germinated in only three days, so this has only set the cantaloupe harvest back about two weeks.  Estimated time to maturity is 85 days or mid-Septemberish.  Of course, that is assuming we get any harvest at all and I don't kill the plant in some way before then.

Pepper plants.  The pepper plants are growing.  Four of the five either currently have or have had blossoms.  The banana pepper is growing the most, but has not yet made any blossoms. 

The really exciting part is that one of the plants (Big Bertha) has two small baby peppers. 

Baby bell peppers on Big Bertha plant

Unfortunately, the Big Bertha plant is also the one that seems to be in distress and keeps dropping leaves.  I don't know if it is from too much water, too little water, or heat issues.  I hope I don't kill the plant before the peppers are usable.

Tomato class in Dallas.  On Saturday we went to a Fall Tomato class at North Haven Gardens in Dallas.  It is a long ways to go (near SMU), but NHG has beautiful plants chosen specifically for north Texas.  They have a good selection of seeds and various accessories.  Their staff is also knowledgeable and tolerant of my many questions.

I am glad I had done research ahead of time or I would have been totally lost in the class.  As it was, I learned a lot and hopefully picked up some important tips on how to properly plant the tomato plants.

One of the things that I did learn was that the entire garden, not just the areas planted, should be mulched and kept watered.  Otherwise the high temperatures from the sun will kill all of the important bacteria and other living components in the soil.  It makes sense, but I had not considered it since to me dirt is dirt.

New tomato plants.  Based on our research and the class, we bought four tomato plants which we planted this morning. The four tomato plants include three different varieties:  Supersweet 100, Fourth of July, and Paul Robeson.

Four tomato plants behind two pepper plants

All three varieties are indeterminate, i.e. vining as opposed to bush types.  Indeterminate tomato plants can be grown in only one square foot each since they can be made to grow on the trellis.  Bush or determinate varieties require nine square feet each. 

Supersweet 100  are very sweet cherry tomatoes, what my tomato book calls "tomato candy", with an estimated maturity of 63-70 days.   The Fourth of July plants produce small (4 oz) tomatoes, but reach maturity in only 49 days.  If planted in the spring they mature by Independence Day, hence the name.  The Paul Robeson plant will be an experiment.  It is an heirloom variety (90 day maturity).  Since it is an heirloom it is probably more susceptible to disease, but it apparently has a strong cult following among tomato experts due at least in part to its taste.  I hope it survives, because it will be great to have some tomatoes that have more taste than what is sold in the grocery store.

I am not sure any of these maturity times take into account our hot summer temperatures.  Most tomato plants will not set fruit until the temperatures are below 92 during the day and 75 at night.

Beginning to look more like a real garden

Even if the tomatoes do not produce fruit any time soon, at least the garden is slowly taking shape and looking more and more like a real garden.  The challenge for the next month will be to keep everything watered, but not over watered.

Next round of plantings.  The tomatoes are the last of the plants to be transplanted.  Everything else this year will be from seeds, all of which we got while at North Haven Gardens.  These will be planted at various times, but the first big planting will be on August 1.  On August 1, we will plant bush beans, wax bush beans, pole beans, zucchini, and broccoli. 

Since all of the remaining plantings will be from seeds and hence produce little seedlings, I have to figure out how to protect them from the rabbits.  Possibilities include more garden cages similar to what is over the cantaloupe or a fence around the entire garden.  Both have advantages and disadvantages, so I am not sure how to proceed.  Stay tuned.

Wascally Wabbits

It has just been over two weeks since we planted the first things in the veggie garden and in general everything was doing great.  This was in spite of torrential rains followed by high heat.

All five pepper plants seemed healthy and several were sporting blossoms.  It is not clear whether the peppers will actually form with heat currently over 90 degrees each day, but it is good to see them looking healthy.

Three happy pepper plants.

The cantaloupe seeds germinated in about four days after they were planted on June 6.  They were slow to grow, but had just started showing additional leaves in the last couple of days beyond the two "starter" leaves. 

Cantaloupe on 6/11/16, five days after initial planting.

Everything looked good from the window before leaving for our walk this morning, but all was not good upon our return when I went out to water everything.

All that is left of the two cantaloupe seedlings.

There were only two stubs left where the cantaloupe seedlings had been just a couple of hours earlier.  I don't know what committed this dastardly deed, but this site describes rabbit damage as follows:

Rabbits have both upper and lower incisors, so when they feed, they create a clean cut. Vegetation almost looks like it’s been trimmed with hand clippers.

That seems like a pretty good description of what is left of those poor cantaloupe plants.  I did not catch them red handed, but we have certainly have seen many rabbits around this year, including in our yard.

One of the neighborhood rabbits in our backyard.  I yelled at him when I saw him munching on the miniature mondo grass, but he just looked at me until I actually went outside.

 

The Peter Rabbit stories were among some of the favorites to be read in our house several decades ago.  Unfortunately I now must admit that although formerly viewed as soft, fuzzy, and cute, 

One of Gwen's favorites

the neighborhood rabbits have now been downgraded to varmint status and are perilously close to being put on the backyard terrorist list if this continues.  

We are going to have to figure out how to keep them out of the garden or at least away from the small seedlings.  I planted two more cantaloupe seeds this afternoon, but will cover the seedlings with some kind of yet to be identified anti-rabbit device (perhaps a chicken wire cage of some sort) in the next few days before the seeds germinate.  

The rabbits haven't bothered the pepper plants so far (knock on wood).  We have installed one of the trellises for tomato plants and plan to get and plant those this weekend.  I don't know whether rabbits eat tomato plants or not.  The next plantings after that (all from seeds) will not be until the first of August. (Yes, "fall" gardening in Texas is weird.)  If they leave the larger plants alone, we have a bit of time to figure out how to fence things off.  However, right now it is not obvious how we are going to do that.

Beginning of the Vegetable Garden

As indicated in the previous post, the raised bed with lots of good dirt was installed on May 21 by Liberty Urban Agriculture, a young husband (youth minister) and wife team doing this work as a second income.  It went into the space in the side yard we had left when doing the landscape remodeling.

 

Raised bed immediately after installation

The dirt was mostly bulk compost from the City of Plano, but also included lots of bags of commercial dirt from Home Depot.

The end result was a very loose, friable soil which supposedly will not need any additional fertilizer for the first set of plants.

All in all, they did a great job and the work was completed just in time to avoid the almost non-stop rains we had at the end of May...six inches of rain over about 10 days.  The bed is definitely well watered!  However, since it is raised, it seems to drain well.

I have spent a large amount of time figuring out what to grow and where.  Two major things had been decided even early on.

• We would be using the square foot gardening method,  although I ended up modifying this a little bit.  This method was popularized by Mel Bartholomew in a 1981 book which the Frog got back in the 1980's.  When I began looking at this in detail over the past few months I also got the very recent second edition.  I am very glad I did, since it is significantly different than the first edition.   The two cover somewhat different material, so complement each other.

• The other major decision was that we would start with a fall garden (i.e. planting in the summer to harvest in the fall) instead of planting in the spring to harvest in the summer.  I did not want to be forced to put the garden together at the same time I was teaching my last semester and moving out of my office.  Although it is a bit tricky with regards to planning what to plant when and may also present some challenges in finding plants to transplant, that was definitely the right decision.  Some books also point out that there are actually some advantages to the fall garden.  The soil is warmer so the seeds germinate faster and plants such as lettuce that tend to bolt in hot weather will have longer to produce as the weather becomes cooler in the fall.  We will see.

It initially seemed somewhat overwhelming to determine when and how to plant everything.  I nosed around on the web and found several planning programs that could help.  I decided to go with GrowVeg.  I can drag and drop the various plants into a footprint for the garden.  The program already has information about how many plants can be put into each square (or squares) in the garden if using the square foot gardening method.  It has been fun to play with and has greatly aided the process.

Here is the tentative plan we came up with for this year's garden.  The emphasis was on easy to grow things that we know we will use.  (The numbers in each square are the number of plants in that square foot.) 

This link has our plan, the list of plants/seeds and the schedule for planting.  I will update the notes on the right side of the plant list as things are planted or other things happen, so the information at that link should remain current.

Although the GrowVeg program provides suggestions for the planting schedule, I have primarily been using information from North Haven Gardens in Dallas.  Here is their list of planting dates, highlighted for those plants we plan to put into our garden.

One of the central tenets of the square foot gardening approach is allowing the plants to grow up so they take less space.  Our plan will require two 4-foot long trellises along the back (north) side, one at each end.  One will be for the tomatoes.  The other will be for the pole beans and zucchini.  We have the materials for the trellises and will work on the construction in the next few weeks.

Cantaloupe can also be grown on trellises (with extra support for the melons), but I decided against that.  Instead, the cantaloupe will be in the 3x3 space in the southeast corner rather than a 1x2 space along the back.  It may end up draping outside of the garden if it gets too big.

June 6 was D-Day for the garden.  We had already laid out a grid with screw eyes and nylon string.  We planted pepper plants, marigold plants and the cantaloupe seeds.  It isn't much for those people who do a lot of gardening, but we were excited.

Garden after first day (June 6) of planting--two squares of marigolds, five squares of pepper plants, and cantaloupe seeds planted.  Lots more will be added in the coming weeks.

We have all of the material for the trellises and will work on those in preparation for planting of the tomatoes about July 1.  Stay tuned.