Lazy Potatoes
We finally harvested one of the lazy potatoes crates! I LOVE digging through the dirt to find potatoes; it's proof that there is way more going on under the soil than we assume. The red potatoes are still growing strong - their stalks are still green for the most part. The yellow potatoes on the other hand had completely died back. So I dug em up, and this is what we got in terms of big-enough potatoes:
I ate a couple of these guys baked and they were delicious! Very potato-y. There were also twelve teeny tiny potatoes, most smaller than a thumbnail. I decided to see if I can get those to grow any larger, so I replanted them in the crate, and lightly covered them with soil. We'll see if anything happens by the time the red guys are ready for harvest.
Pomegranate
It took a couple of months, but all of the blossoms have officially dropped off my beloved pom. Sad face. On the upside though, I was free to prune back the extra branches and numerous suckers that have sprouted this year. I did a little research into different styles of pruning, and decided to keep three main stalks. This will give the plant more of a bush appearance than a tree appearance, and since my pom is a dwarf variety (i think...bought it before I had myfolia.com to supplement my shoddy memory) a bush shape made more sense to me. Plus, I couldn't bear to cut it back to just one stalk after all the hard work it put into growing the rest this year.
The pomegranate in the spring, shooting suckers from the base and pretending
like it was gonna make me some fruit.
Pruned pomegranate with only three main stems remaining
and criss-crossing branches removed.
There appears to be two main methods of pruning a pomegranate: the landscape aesthetic and the fruit-bearing priority. For the former, you trim branches down to the trunk, as well as most/all of the suckers, and any criss-crossing branches. If you leave one stem, you will eventually have a tree shape to your pomegranate plant. I opted to leave 3 main stems to maintain the plant's natural vase like shape. And I think the foliage is pretty, so there's that.
The second method is generally used by commercial fruit growers who want to increase their yield and have little need for an aesthetically pleasing plant. For this method, all stems and branches are shortened to increase spring growth and therefore flowers anf fruit. There is also the advantage of keeping the plant compact and the fruits easy to harvest. But you are left with an unsightly stump from which all the branches grow.
When I pruned my pom this weekend, I decided to use the cuttings to try to clone my plant. I had four good looking cuttings, 8-14 inches long. I've dipped them in rooting powder and placed in our kitchen to hopefully do their thing! One of the clones, I can already tell, is not going to make it. But that still leaves 3 possibilities, so fingers crossed!
Photo snapped three days after cuttings were taken; most seem to be doing pretty well.
Tomatoes From Seed
I've mentioned numerous times that we started our tomatoes super late, so I'm not going to get into that today. But it is very interesting, if not exactly surprising, to note a few differences among tomatoes all started from seed at the same time. The plants that are in-ground have out-grown and out-produced the container tomatoes by easily 5x-10x.
Sad looking container tomatoes. The clear container tomatoes no longer exist due to an
unfortunate run in with the neighbor kids' basketball.
The five plants in the garden have taken over; even plants that would normally grow prolifically, like the artichoke and tomatillos, have been dwarfed by the tomatoes. The plants reached about six feet tall with a spread of 8-10 feet last week (that's per plant, not all together) and are still producing massive amounts of flowers.
It's a jungle in there.
In an effort to get more sunlight onto the tomatoes themselves, I've been pruning back the leafy green growth once or twice a week for the past month. And honestly, they bounce back so quickly, you can hardly tell. I finally decided to trim the ends of all of the plants in an effort to keep the growth under control and also force the plants to focus on the tomatoes that are setting and ripening. My Riviera plant at this point has over thirty good sized fruits, and easily as many flowers still left on the branches.
Cluster of Riviera tomatoes.
There are more art-tomatoes forming on the Black Krim, and that first one I mentioned in the megablooms post is getting to be an impressive size.
Black Krim art tomato!
As it stands right now, it looks like we will be harvesting hundreds of tomatoes at the end of September, so DudeLife and I are already plotting to get a few more flats of canning jars for sauces, salsas, pickled green tomatoes and whatever else we feel like doing. I have a feeling we'll be giving quite a few of them away to friends and family as well. I can't wait!
Project Update 2.1 (corn, squash, seed saving and vermi-compost tea!) to follow soon!
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