Thursday, May 26th

FINALLY!

We have had a few spring days here in Providence this week. Days where I've actually had the pleasure of the sun in my eyes as I drive east to work in the morning and again as I head west in the late afternoon. This not only makes me happy, but makes the plants in #10 and #12u happy, too!

The other night I ran over to the garden and gave the heirloom tomatoes their ladders so that they will have plenty of support when they choose to make a "grow for it"!

I had just read a section from my new garden book of the season, "All New Square Foot Gardening" about using a single stem method for tomatoes. So I took it upon myself, without asking my expert gardener (Tera), to prune the branches that were on the bottom of each stem. I brought them home and am waiting to see if they root in water. If I'm so lucky that it happens, then we'll have more tomato plants.

Well, much to my surprise this single stem method seemed to do just what the book suggested! All of the energy the plant had was able to be spent on fewer branches and in just a few days, I have a few flowers on this plant! Yay!

Johnny Jump Ups are still looking good.

They are so simple and yet make me smile when I see them in the corner of #10. Still waiting on the poppies to open up.

On Monday when I stopped by the garden (nearly dark as you can tell by the flashy picture), I sent a picture to Tera asking if we had weeds or tomatillos. She says they are tomatillos! This means that the few tomatillos that fell at the end of the last season, ended up providing #10 with some volunteer tomatillos! "Cool", is what this new gardener has to say!

So, considering that wonderful news, I went back to the garden tonight and tried to the best of my ability to dig up the clumps of tomatillos and put them into rows.

Here are some of the tomatillos that I've separated and put into little rows. We may end up with nothing but a tomatillo plot! It's okay if they don't all make the transition to rows since Tera has started from seed and will be bring them to RI soon.

I didn't take any pictures of them, but I'm pretty confident that the little holes that you can see in the leaves here are the result of Colorado Potato Beetles. (I KNOW, hello these are tomatoes, not POTATOES!) They lay these little yellow eggs at underneath the leaves. I tried to remove any eggs that I found this evening.

The other annoyance tonight throughout the process was the White Grubs. I remember only seeing a few of these all last season... not the case for 2011. I think that I saw at least 5 tonight! I don't like them. They look nasty and I wanted to know more about them. I learned that they are the larvae of the June bug. So they don't really do any harm as long as their is organic material for them to eat...from now on, instead of throwing them out of plot #10 and #12u, I'll remove them and put them in our compost piles. Seems like there's plenty of food there for them.