farm with a view

Don’t get me wrong. I love gardening magazines. But I also think their pretty photos can sometimes be a bit, well, misleading.

To be sure, there’s nothing quite like coming across a family of beans hidden behind a cluster of leaves, or seeing a delicate baby squash at the end of a fire-orange blossom, or spotting the first blush of red on a bell pepper. But, when the excitement and photo-taking wear off and you realize that more tomato leaves have browned and the aphids you tried to spray off three days earlier have now multiplied by a million … Well, it’s back to reality. Gotta roll up those sleeves and get to work.

These past few months have afforded us a bit of a reality check. Suspicious holes in our vegetables. A sudden surplus of dead leaves. Dropped fruit. But funny enough, our plants are still producing pretty well (according to us, anyway), and we still feel happy and accomplished every time we leave the garden with truly homegrown, organic produce. Perhaps, even when things look ragged and ugly and hopeless, Mother Nature has a way, and we appreciate it even more. (more…)

It was a quiet, overcast morning at the garden. I forgot to bring my camera, so was forced to try the camera on my new old phone. (“New” meaning it’s new to me; a buddy who works at a mobile carrier company hooked me up with a phone after mine broke. “Old” meaning it’s a model from, oh, five years ago.) Check it out:

Seriously, that’s the shot. No Photoshopping whatsoever. Probably for the best, since our tomato plants are dying by the day. But they still have a ton of huge fruits on them that are slowly ripening, a few at a time, so I’m not complaining yet. Compared to the plants we’ve seen on other plots, I’d say we’re in the solid 50th percentile as far as how well our plants are faring. Not bad for first-timers.

We picked 12 tomatoes, two zukes, some more beans and basil. Way too much basil. Thankfully, we ran into our Old Lady Neighbor when we got home and gave her a bunch. She is an old-school guerrilla gardener. That will be a post of its own on another day.

Here’s a shot that shows off the heirloom tomato’s signature wedges. It’s so weird:

And that’s all for today. Time for some lazy Sunday wine!

Drove over to the garden after work and met up with Andrew, who biked up the hill from his office on Ocean Park Ave. It was nice to hang out together and watch the marine layer roll in as we watered. (Yeah, still waiting for summer … )

(taking up three hoses; yep, that’s how we roll)

(Minnesota Midget musk melons, more zukes and – finally – some tomatoes)

(back in the kitchen: mystery lima beans, the first harvest)

(Black Krim tomato. Quite the happy, winking one)

One day, in the dead of winter (here in southern California, haha), I’ll look back at this photo and think, damn, I cannot believe I’m paying $2.99 for a teeny pack of basil at the supermarket:

Two major developments at the garden today.

1. We arrived to find that one of the Brandywine plants fell over. Cage and all. Thankfully it didn’t snap so we were able to stake it back upright. It’s pretty amazing how plants can be so resilient.

2. We dismantled the Brandywine SIP. It produced a whopping total of two tomatoes, pictured above. (At least the ripe one is proper beefsteak size.) We needed more bamboo stakes to reinforce the in-ground tomatoes, and there weren’t any more fruits on the plant, so too bad. Andrew disengaged the top bucket from the bottom bucket and a tangle of roots was sticking out, drawing water from the bottom bucket. Wonder why the plant still ended up so spindly. Clearly, this experiment with the SIPs is not going too well.

Overall, we have a sh*tload of green tomatoes that are getting pretty ginormous, and now I’m worried that the stems will snap from the weight. Someone suggested using pantyhose. When was the last time anyone bought pantyhose?? However, I will suck up my pride and do it, if need be.

We plucked one of the three or four tomatoes on the (slowly dying) Earl of Edgecomb plant. It is still pretty firm, but we won’t be able to visit the garden until next weekend so figured it would ripen a bit more on the counter:

Another Ocean View Farms gardener walked by and mentioned that his tomatoes are coloring, but still hard as tennis balls. Wondering what’s going on. Maybe the weird weather? It hasn’t really been hot – as in above 80 degrees – until this past week. (And even then we had a few super cloudy mornings.)

At least it’s good to know we aren’t the only ones with this problem.