Harvesting surprises

This year, I limited my edible garden to a big container of Sungold tomatoes. Three plants yielded a couple of handfuls of little yellow tomatoes each week.  There were just enough to graze through when working in the garden, but not enough to pick for cooking.



 

 

But you'll notice that in addition to the yellow Sungolds in the photograph above, there are some bursting at the seams red grape tomatoes.  Oh, those bad boys! These muscley guys sprung from a rogue plant that either self-sowed from last year's tomato crop or sprouted from a topdressing of spring compost.

 

 

 

Either way, this rambunctious tomato plant is busy growing up and over a nearby peony. I don't think that this is what is intended by the current fashion of interplanting flowers and vegetables but, hey, until the first frost clips the harvest, this unruly jumble of vegatation and little fruiting flowers is good by me.

 

 

And also good by me are these ripening ornamental peppers, a bonus from a more decorative container. Don't think that I'll be grabbing a bunch for casual snacking any time soon--hopefully, they're hot enough to add a spicy kick to whatever's cooking!

 

 

Sungold harvest

This year, I planted two pots of "Sungold" cherry tomatoes, along with the usual container of "Sugary" grape tomatoes.  The good news is that we now have lots of cherry tomatoes, even after the low-hanging fruit has been harvested by the local bunnies.  This plate is holding about half of what ripened up over the Labor Day weekend.

The not-so-good news is that in comparison with the sweet grape tomatoes, these cherry tomatoes taste bitter. Maybe it wouldn't be noticeable if there was only one crop but with the sugary competition, these cherry tomatoes are also-rans.  And, while the tomato fruits are perfect saffron-colored spheres, the plants' growth habit is slovenly, sprawling, and downright shabby.

A few are being eaten straight off the vine (by humans), but most have been regulated to cooking tomatoes.  They are serving in pasta dishes and ratatouille and as salad garnish.  Did I mention that we now have lots of them?  Oh, yeah. Maybe next year, we'll have none.

Integrated Pest Management, the natural way

At first I thought this was a joke. What family trickster had tossed a white panicle of flowers onto my tomato plants?



But closer inspection revealed that this was no laughing matter for two of the three parties involved.

Me, because that "flower" was actually a hornworm caterpillar (Manduca quinquemaculata) feeding on my tomato plants!

The hornworm, because those white "blossoms" were actually cocoons of parasitic braconid wasps (Cotesia congregatus) feeding on it!



Here's where it gets really ugly. The braconid wasps lay eggs inside the hornworm caterpillar. In their larval stage, the wasps eat through the hornworm's body to its surface, where they spin these tiny white cocoons. After hatching, the wasps continue introducing other tomato hornworms to their lethal brand of Integrated Pest Management.



So there's a happy ending for two of the three parties involved. And a natural ending to the third!

So sweet, so red, so bountiful

Happily, it's hard to keep up with the abundance of container-grown cherry and grape tomatoes. We pick a few handfuls for dinner every night and, the next evening, there are still more to harvest.



Tying up branches, pinching out yellowed foliage, and reaching between the leaves for ripe tomatoes immerses you in that special tomato smell--the perfume of summer! And these "Sugary" grape tomatoes taste pretty darn good, too.

First harvest

"Sungold" cherry tomatoes just picked, sweet and summery, from the vine!

Yellow flowers in containers

This year, I replaced the succulents in my outdoor table centerpiece with a slew of yellow flowering annuals-- Osteospermum "Lemon Symphony," Calibrachoa hybrid "Yellow Chiffon"--accented with blue flecks of Ageratum "Hawaii Blue" and Nemesia fruticans "Bluebird."



Another container boasts a host of yellow flowers that will soon ripen into vegetables. These summer-promising "Sungold" cherry tomatoes were transplanted just a couple of weeks ago.

Preventive care, the garden variety

Maybe I'm bringing my work home too much. I just submitted my chapter on "Preventive Care" for publication in The New Museum Registration Methods, 5th edition, so preservation is on my mind.

Last night, temperatures down into the 30s were forecast. So I applied some garden-variety preventive care to my newly-planted tomatoes in order to protect them from the cold: "Micro-environments can be produced to maintain desired temperature and RH levels within small areas . . . a quantity of cellulosic materials may be incorporated into the object’s container in order to buffer fluctuations in RH and temperature."



Works for museum collections and works for tomato plants--particularly when, by chance, your newspaper wrapping celebrates "A Night at the Museum"!

Raised vegetable gardening

Last year, thanks to a tomato volunteer that sprouted in my compost pile, I found myself to be an accidental vegetable gardener. And I have to admit that for several weeks, it was pretty darned nice to be able to pack a handful of just-picked tomatoes into my brown bag lunch every morning.



So this year, I decided to be a bit more intentional in my vegetable gardening. Rather than simply be grateful that a tomato plant had squeezed its way out of my compost pile, I decided that I would shoehorn a few plants into a sunny spot in the garden. First, though, I had to make a little space, which I did by resting a bluestone slab over a window well. This sort-of raised bed supports two large pots of "Sungold" cherry tomatoes; a third pot of "Sugary" grape tomatoes rests on the curb of an adjacent window well.



The arched bamboo supports are a whimsy, playing off of the rounded rose arbor and trellis. Maybe I'm still having just a little difficulty acknowledging that these plants are functional rather than merely decorative. I'm sure that I'll come around by harvest in 60 days!

Hey, lookit here!

"Hey lookit here!" That was the type of ungrammatical declaration that set my mother's teeth on edge. She knew her gerunds, participles, and infinitives, and she simply would not bite on that verbal formulation.

But I couldn't contain my ungrammatical enthusiasm when, back home from my various travels, I found a crop of ripe grape tomatoes.



Here's the first haul from my accidental vegetable garden. Definitely not an heirloom or exotic hybrid--just whatever generic variety was selling at the local supermarket back in the spring. Two pint boxes at $2.99, perhaps?



Grammatical or not, we've been sinking our teeth into them. Delicious!

The accidental vegetable gardener

Except for the occasional pot of herbs, I am determinedly not a vegetable gardener. Oh, there was a time, many years ago, when I tolerated a few tomato plants, but I soon enough decided that I'd much rather have the visual enjoyment of flowers to the culinary pleasure of fresh vegetables. I'm happy to support our local farmers' market.

But, the other morning as I was weeding along this bed of daylilies, I discovered that I was a vegetable gardener after all.



Well, a vegetable gardener of very modest inclinations. The compost bin at the end of the daylily bed had sprouted a tomato plant.



A wayward tomato seed from our kitchen refuse managed to keep its roots wet, warm, and well nourished inside while it sent a sprawl of stalks out through a slit in the side in the bin.



This tomato plant has even set a few blossoms. Will staking be the next step? And, then, perhaps, fresh tomatoes?