Judith keeps watch over her newly ripening tomatoes, continuing her planting, and reveling in the delights of her collection of daylilies.
Greetings fellow gardeners,
It is a bit cool this morning, which is giving me a glimpse of Autumn. It has been raining, which really helps when it comes to weeding. The weeds are glorious: my creeping bellflower has many tiny purple flowers, and the goldenrod has tripled its size. I pull out as much of the creeping bellflower as I can because it chokes out my perennials, but I leave a healthy stand of goldenrod for the pollinators.
At last, the tomatoes are starting to ripen with bright red tomatoes and small yellow pear tomatoes and several in between. This is when you may find that some of your tomatoes have blossom-end rot. This can be so discouraging when you have been waiting patiently for some yummy ripe tomatoes. Blossom-end rot looks like a large dark splotch on the bottom of your tomato. It is caused by irregular watering and lack of regular feeding. If you have this problem, remove the tomatoes showing the disorder and start regularly watering and feeding. Your plant will recover.
Tomatoes ripening
Last week I started to plant for a garden refresh. I planted radish seeds in individual seed cells, and they are all up and flourishing. According to the experiment that I am following, I can leave the radishes in the cells until they are ready to harvest. I chose two smaller rounder radishes (Cherry Belle and Easter Egg) and am looking forward to seeing how they do. The beans that I planted have started to come up. They are doing well, and I can transplant them once the roots have formed a good base. There are some nasturtiums that I have started in cardboard toilet paper tubes. The entire tube can be planted when they are ready. I can always use more nasturtiums.
Seedlings for a refreshed garden
The pot of lettuce continues to produce and this week I planted another pot so that I can keep enjoying fresh lettuce in my salads. In my cool weather planter, the spinach is climbing like crazy and the chard is lovely. I have let one of the radishes go to seed. I like to collect radish seeds and the seed pods are so fascinating. Apparently, radish seed pods are supposed to be tasty, so I am going to test that.
Radish flowers
As many of you know, I love daylilies. I see daylilies as the perfect plant when you have a difficult area. They do well in poor soil and on a hill and they bring in the pollinators for your vegetable garden. There are many daylilies blooming in my garden right now: yellow, cream, pink, peach, red and some that are deep, dark, and mysterious. On Tuesday I watched Trowel Talk Live which is a lunchtime lecture series put on by the Master Gardeners of Ottawa Carleton (mgottawa.ca). Information is available at the website about Trowel Talk Live. Master Gardener Kelly Noel gave a fascinating talk on how to propagate daylilies. I chose a couple of my favourites to cross. If you would like to see this talk it is on YouTube at https://youtu.be/ZJYEEbHRKaw .
Keep an eye on the weather. Be sure that your plants in pots are getting enough water and if they seem to be getting too much water, make sure the pot has good drainage. Enjoy your week.
Judith. (Email: sghorticultural@gmail.com)
Veggie Bites are available at https://sghorticultural.wixsite.com/website or https://gardeningcalendar.ca/articles/veggie-bites/
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