I guess since I've been getting ripe tomatoes for about a month I was hoping for more of them to be getting ripe now? Maybe I am just being impatient. Last year my seeds arrived months after ordering so I only got a couple tomatoes before the first frost. So my memory of what I usually get is all over the place.
I grew them from seed but started indoors. But last year my seeds showed up in like June so it was kind of a hopeless endeavor. This year I had nice full sized plants that I grew indoors from seed to plant outside when the weather was ready so they are WAY ahead this year.If you can plant tomatoes by seed you are in a whole different world than us.
Thanks! I'm excited to see how the plants fill out. Not a lot of selection this time of year, but still fun to plant-shop. I hit up a few nurseries and just looked for things that are drought tolerant, ideally salt tolerant for winter and good for pollinators. DH wanted the fountain grass because our neighbors have it and he really liked that, so I added that in. We have a big pine tree that overhangs this section and it's east facing so it's not as bad as it could be for our climate.Ooooh, that looks nice!
I de-grassed and planted my hellstrip in Portland. Alternated sections of rock with sections of low-growing, spreading water-wise plants in most of it, then relocated strawberry plants to another area. As time went on, I realized I should have spread the strawberry plants out in the entire hellstrip and let them take over. They grew and spread like crazy. It was a fairly busy street so probably plenty of pollution in the fruit. Plus they got watered by passing dogs. I wouldn't eat the berries but my neighbors would.
Here in Colorado I stick with common and drought-resistant plants. And have no hellstrip (yay!)
It's funny - here my strawberries thrive in almost full shade. But in local gardening forums that seems to be a general rule. If the tag says full sun it means Utah part to even mostly shade. Anything you want to plant in full sun needs to be be basically xeric. And part shade means full shade. We just have to translate the tags to account for intense sun and heat. The local gardening forums are filled with pics of crispy dead plants that someone is asking what is wrong - the tag says full sun???The strawberries in Portland were planted near the fence in a shaded area. They were barely getting by. The hellstrip faced west so they got tons of sun -- ok, tons of sun for Portland! -- and they took off.
I thought about using them as groundcover on the side yard here but was afraid they'd need more water than I wanted to give them since they'd be facing west. I put in Korean lilac instead. Which reminds me ... I never posted a photo of them.
Lol @vickie I've never heard "hellstrip." We just call them parking strips. I always appreciate people that garden on theirs. A lot of us just have street trees; the grass around the trees dies back in summer but greens up again in mid-September when it starts raining.
We had our first precip yesterday in 49 days. I'm not sure it was measurable though so maybe it doesn't count. It just sprinkled big ploppy drops briefly but pretty hard, on block party night, and everyone thought it was glorious. All the chips and other food got rained on and no one cared.
Ha ha - figures it would rain on party day!Lol @vickie I've never heard "hellstrip." We just call them parking strips. I always appreciate people that garden on theirs. A lot of us just have street trees; the grass around the trees dies back in summer but greens up again in mid-September when it starts raining.
We had our first precip yesterday in 49 days. I'm not sure it was measurable though so maybe it doesn't count. It just sprinkled big ploppy drops briefly but pretty hard, on block party night, and everyone thought it was glorious. All the chips and other food got rained on and no one cared.
So last Friday I picked my first Ichiban eggplant and Sunday another was ready. I wanted to use them up since the rest on the plant were too far behind to accumulate more. Decided to try a simple recipe for garlic roasted Japanese eggplant that I found online, it was soooooooooooo yummy! I'll definitely be making this again.
Garlic Roasted Japanese Eggplant Recipe
Found @ realhealthyrecipesdotcom (a blog site by Diana Keuilian) & entered here for the Culinary Quest #3 because I love eggplant & appreciate all things simple & flavorful. Diana said "The key to making this recipe extra delicious is to roast it until it’s really really tender & golden. If in...www.recipezazz.com
I was definitely thinking that Zucchini would be great this way as well, so this confirms it!Oooh! I make eggplant this way, with parmesan sprinkled on top. Also zucchini strips! I can't stop eating them SO good!
I was definitely thinking that Zucchini would be great this way as well, so this confirms it!
While we had plenty of rain this summer, there were times I had to water. I could not have carried water - I'm thankful my hose was long enough! (Incidentally, after I posted this, I joined a square foot gardening forum, and someone there had the same problem. The guy who wrote the book on straw bale gardening told her she likely watered it too much during conditioning. That, along with the very wet summer we've had contributed to the demise)I think they generally collapse at the end of the season. If your plants produced fruit, you probably fertilized just right!
My attempts at straw bale gardening didn’t do very well, but they were too far from the water! Lesson learned. There’s good “ventilation” so mine likely needed much more water than I carried over there.