2019 Garden

Are the plants indeterminate types?
If so, prune the plants to a single meristem and remove any excess flowers from fruit clusters. Doing that will help push them to ripen faster.

JEREMY wrote:

Just curious about what anyone does to help support pepper plants all 36 of mine blew over in the storm last Friday. I carefully stood them back up and they look fine but im sure it will happen again. They are to big to try and put tomato cages over but will next year for sure.

I’ve always used the smaller, cheap tomato cages, had your problem one year and have never looked back. I will admit fishwater’s cages look pretty nice, though…

______________ wrote:

Are the plants indeterminate types?
If so, prune the plants to a single meristem and remove any excess flowers from fruit clusters. Doing that will help push them to ripen faster.

X2, this will trick the plant focus its energy to ripening fruit vs growing larger vines or producing more flowers.

Thanks! I will give it a try.

JEREMY wrote:

Just curious about what anyone does to help support pepper plants all 36 of mine blew over in the storm last Friday. I carefully stood them back up and they look fine but im sure it will happen again. They are to big to try and put tomato cages over but will next year for sure.

I just pound a stake of some sort next to the plant and tie them up.

Picked tonight.

I tried getting them all tied up between the monsoons and tornado warnings last night. Never made it over to check them before work this morning. Fingers crossed they are all standing.

Picked 3 zucchini last night spiralized them and made spaghetti and to my surprise my 1 and 3 year old girls actually ate a bunch of it. Best part I grew the noodles made the sauce and even butchered the cow the hamburger came from. Was weirdly gratifying.

Not to answer myself but of course my girlfriend couldn’t just let me have my moment without saying “now you have to learn how to make parmesan cheese”.

Any ideas on what causes this?

Here is what I have on file for BER

Blossom End Rot
Physiological Disorder

Symptoms:
Blossom end rot can affect fruit at all stages of development. The characteristic symptom is a progressive deterioration of the blossom end of the fruit, from a water-soaked appearance to a sunken, black, leathery lesion. While secondary fungal infections may occur, blossom end rot is a physiological disorder caused by calcium deficiency induced by water stress.

Control:
Careful water management practices are a key. Irrigation and/or mulching are important. Application of lime or calcium prior to planting may help. Liquid fertilization using calcium nitrate can be used for small plots.

Blossom-End Rot (BER) – Characterized by a large, leathery brown or black spot on the bottom of the fruit. (Fig. 1). In some cases, internal BER can occur within fruit. It generally occurs on the first fruit cluster. BER is caused by a lack of calcium in the fruit which causes the fruit to die back creating the characteristic spot. What can you do to prevent it? Have your soil tested to make sure calcium is present in adequate amounts. Chances are the calcium level will be fine but if it is not, add limestone (for acid soils with a pH below 6), or gypsum when the soil pH is in the 6 to 7 range. If calcium levels are okay, the next most important control is to maintain optimum soil moisture. When tomatoes experience the slightest bit of drought, BER may result. Using mulches will usually significantly decrease BER as excessive evaporation from soil is reduced. If growing on bare ground, avoid cultivating too close to plants to prevent root damage and the need to maintain deep root development. Varieties will vary in their susceptibility so if you have a problem with a particular variety, choose a new one next year. When side-dressing plants, using a nitrate type fertilizer like calcium nitrate is preferable to ammonium based ones like urea. Finally, don’t bother to use calcium sprays. They are worthless in combating the problem. The same problem can occur on pepper and eggplant.

I picked my first mader late last week, got maybe 3 more getting ready by this weekend!

Riddle me this. My favorite pasta tomato plant, polish linguisa, started of with something that is not then the rest of the plant seems to be producing what it is supposed to do. Pictures hopefully describe the situation.

Yep, you are right, the pics are not describing the situation, at least for me, Is there an issue?

1hl&sinker wrote:

Riddle me this. My favorite pasta tomato plant, polish linguisa, started of with something that is not then the rest of the plant seems to be producing what it is supposed to do. Pictures hopefully describe the situation.

I didn’t follow that. The plant photos look good to me.

The first picture to me looks like a roma tomato. They don’t get real big but great for making sauce. Very meaty.

Polish linguisa get big, sometimes up to 10 to 12 oz. And don’t look like an ordinary round tomato,almost like a fat animine pepper . The second picture shows an ordinary round tomatoes where the other tomatoes are not. I’m thinking a cross pollination to get to different tomato’s on one plant.

1hl&sinker wrote:

Riddle me this. My favorite pasta tomato plant, polish linguisa, started of with something that is not then the rest of the plant seems to be producing what it is supposed to do. Pictures hopefully describe the situation.

The first couple fruits are akin to double-wide mobile homes. I grow Marzanos, and one out of every dozen plants tends to put out double-wide fruit like that now and again. My guess, you’ll see a couple more.

That could be fishwater, pretty cool how things grow. These 2 oddballs were the first to show out of all my tomatoes plants and driving me nuts while waiting to harvest them.

My ancho peppers are putting out a lot now from this heat humidity but not ready for picking yet. The sereno peppers a starting to pop and the Anihiem are lagging behind.
I got one tomato plant that survived the last frost we had. Nursed it from one leaf. Stunted in growth but putting out tomatoes.
Thats what I got tomatoes and peppers and a couple of different basil plants to maybe enhance the tomato flavor.

I have five heirloom tomatoes, four “pink” that were started from saved seed [thanks DennyO] and one market bought plant. These are planted apart from the other tomatoes and were approaching the six foot high area before the storms yesterday and again this morning. Now they’re about 3 foot tall. Its too wet to go see if they just slipped back in the caging or actually broke off. Most of my peppers have been tipped over too and they were heavy with peppers. I may be able to stand the peppers back up. Damn I hate this violent weather.

Tom most likely they will survive, I’ve had it happen to me too.

I just finished pulling my garlic crop; harvested over two weeks later than typical and it’s still a bit green. This is the first season in almost 20 years with any serious loss. Years past, maybe 3-5% wouldn’t go. This year, two of the four types I grow had over 30% that never even pipped out of the ground. I had all sorts of bulb oddities too. Double, even a few triple scapes, and a couple with daughter bulbets.

First of the year.

Holy green beans! Billy and I blanched and packaged this giant pot of beans tonight from the garden. A total of 29 bags!

Now if the bunches of green tomatoes would just turn red…

The first tomatoes from the garden have turned red!

Sharon wrote:

The first tomatoes from the garden have turned red!

Nice! Our big tomatoes are still green but, I did get to have a few of our Sunset Cherry Tomatoes this week! So delicious!

Question. What kind of things do YOU make with hot peppers? I’m going to have way more than I bargained for. I’ll be using a bunch for salsa (canned & fresh) and a few for making some hot jelly’s. My problem is that my FW doesn’t like hot stuff… At all… I love it and the kids like hot stuff too. I’ve been mixing a few in here and there with dinners but what else can I do with them? We will have Hot Salsa Peppers, Jalapenos, Habaneros, & Ghost Peppers.

Couple ideas – my husband grows hot peppers each year and he recently made bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers. They’re quite good, but I can only eat so many, so he brings them into work to share too. He also will collect a bunch of peppers and dehydrate them, then grind them up to make a hot pepper seasoning. I swear he puts that on everything! I know you said you’ll be making salsa, but you could also be adding hot peppers into tomato sauces too. If you use sweeter tomatoes as the base for either salsas or sauces you can get away with using more hot peppers, as the sweetness of some tomatoes balances things out nicely.

Drying and grinding hot peppers is a great way to keep them handy for use. I found a smaller electric food processor for a buck at a garage sale that I use just for grinding peppers and it works like a million bucks as long as you’re careful to let the dust inside settle before opening it.

I tried fermenting hot peppers one year and finally figured out that buying hot pepper sauce was cheaper and easier. I have had luck pureeing the fresh peppers and adding white vinegar to the mix and simmering them for three or four hours, adding vinegar as needed to keep things fluid. When cooled run the peppers thru a food mill and toss the skins and seeds and bottle up the pepper sauce remaining. Maybe add a pinch of salt to it before bottling. I use smaller store-bought jelly jars/lids to keep this stuff.

The cukes suffered from too much rain and got a fungus so I’ve treated that end of the garden with sulpher powder now. We’ve been eating standard tomatoes right along for a couple weeks, cherry tomatoes fro almost a month and the green peppers are huge now and we’ve been plucking then as desired since they recovered from the storms that knocked them down.

My Marzano tomatoes are not faring well at all. I took a soil sample in to the extension office here to get analyzed to see what I need to do to amend the ground. I noticed last season that they were not as strong looking as other tomatoes near them but this year they are not good at all.

I planted a couple plants of “bunching tomatoes”…like those hot house tomatoes you find in the stores in bunches on the vine….and those guys are keeping the table full. Nice tomatoes not quite the size of a baseball, but super tasty and very sweet. We get four to six on a bunch at a time.

i’m trying to figure this new fangled phone out and havent figured out the picture posting yet.

i pulled my dill , the last of it last nite. thinking of pulling the green beans to but i think they will produce a round 2 crop. making me realize that summer is coming to an end. my onions are probably 2-3 weeks also of getting yanked outta da ground.

the maters are starting to slowly ripen, cukes are coming slowly to!!!!!! kalarabi has produced some but thinking of filing a crop failure claim on them!!!