Harvest Monday 7/8/13

It has been raining all week.  The ground is soggy and the low spots have now become ponds.  It is also the coolest summer I recall.  I got a late start planting this spring and the weather is not encouraging growth.

Not a lot of harvests this week.  Some big Swiss chard leaves, some yellow pear tomatoes, and some very long cucumbers. 

The blackberry foraging has continued.  I neglected to take pictures this week, but the blackberry harvests went into making muffins along with some fresh blackberries to top ice cream for 4^th of July.  I would have had my first big, ripe tomato this week, but all the rain resulted in it cracking and getting engulfed with ants.

At the new garden, I got ambitious and planted a whole 50 foot row of tomatoes.  I was dreaming of drowning in tomatoes.. oh the sauce and salsa I would can!  I usually only have enough space for about six tomato plants and never seem to have enough left over to can.  I thought it was going to be different this year.

Of course I planted all of these tomatoes in a garden that I visited maybe once a week and had no access to water.  (Well, there was the pond, but the haul from the garden to the pond was not fun.)  The good news was that we had a very wet spring.   A bit too wet.  There were times when we had such a downpour that the tomatoes sat in what looked like a rice patty.  The soil here has high clay content, so it holds water a bit too much.

Then the day came that they were going to drill the well.  I was very excited to finally have a well!  I didn’t realize that just because they drilled the well didn’t mean I would get to use it yet.  I had to wait for the permanent electricity to get turned on and that took a very long time.  The well was located uphill from the garden and as close to the garden as I could get without accruing any extra cost. 

I didn’t realize the mess well drilling would cause.  It had rain the day before, so the garden was already saturated.  I guess when they reached the water underground it gushed out.  Along with the water was all the ground up stone that they drilled through.   This created what looked like cement, which then covered the garden.  Since the soil was already saturated, the garden stood in this stuff for at least two days before it dried up.

The row of tomatoes was unfortunately in the path of this cement stuff.   A couple of tomatoes on the end were spared and look somewhat healthy.  

The rest of the tomatoes do not look happy.  They are puny, but are still trying to flower and produce fruit.  I don’t know if it was because of getting saturated or whether they got an overdose of some mineral from the ground up stone.

I dug up and removed the dried cement layer and gave them some fish fertilizer.  I don’t know if I should pluck off the flowers and fruit and try to encourage them to produce more leaves, or whether I should just leave them alone.   I’m thinking this year is not going to be the year of the tomato!

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week, to see what others are harvesting check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.