Green Tomatoes: Gardening 2020

Back in the depths of winter, I decided to try some new things in the garden this summer. It's been a few years since the small beginner's garden that I started in 2017. I was ready to branch out! So I read some gardening books, watched some YouTube videos, and did some garden mapping. I came up with two goals for this year:
  1. Start cultivating fruit
  2. Experiment with trellising/fencing for cucumbers and for tomatoes
Here's how it's been going!

Adding fruit to our mini-homestead


This year I focused on 3 types of fruit--wild black raspberries, peaches, and elderberries.

The black raspberries (which I grew up calling just blackberries) are small and crunchy and juicy and taste of pure summer. My method with these was to corral the wild brambles we already had. In the spring, I selected 3 plants to keep, and tied their canes to 3 stakes. Two of the 3 plants did not like this at all. They had small, stubborn flowers, stunted leaves, and tiny, inedible, seedy berries. But the third plant was a success. It leafed out nicely, had normal blossoms, and set sweet juicy berries that ripened in early July.



Notes for next year: I'm planning to leave the same 3 plants and hope that the angry 2 can establish themselves better and be more fruitful. I will probably do a bit of pruning and tying in the spring and then leave everything alone. I did put some cheesecloth over the berries when almost ripe to protect them from birds--it worked OK though I think the cloth was a bit too thick (may have kept out some sun).

The peach tree that I planted on mother's day has a single, somewhat mangy-looking peach growing. I love it nonetheless because it is my first peach-baby.


Notes for next year: In the late fall or next spring I will prune the inward-facing branches to try to encourage the "vase" shape recommended for peach trees. This will be tricky because my tree has almost all its branches on just one side (it's a real left-leaning Vermonter). I'll also look into fertilizing it somehow. The library has a good fruits & berries book that I will refer to.

The final fruit that I added to our garden is the Elderberry. According to Nourse Farms, the nursery where I purchased the plants (which I received by mail in the midst of the pandemic lockdown), you need two types of Elderberry plants so that they can cross-pollinate properly. So I got one Samdal and one Samyl variety. This first year they are just focusing on growing, but maybe next year we'll have some flowers and berries. Then I plan to tincture the berries to create anti-viral folk medicine.

The plants are about knee-high right now (which is great progress from the small 6-inch sticks that I planted back in May).





















Notes for next year: Some 4-stripe beetles set up shop in June and wrecked a bunch of young leaves. I used some organic insecticide soap to discourage them, and things seem better now. Next year I'll keep an eye out for them. And I'll look into whether I should prune or possibly tie back the plants, since I need them to stay in a certain amount of space.

The trellis experiment: new techniques with tomatoes & cucumbers


YouTubers make everything look so easy. I watched a bunch of videos about creating arched trellises and fence-like trellises for tomatoes and cucumbers, and it looked simple enough. I decided to do a tall fence-style trellis for the tomatoes. (It's like a fence, except the bottom of the fencing starts 18 inches off the ground.) And an arch-style trellis for cucumbers, so they could climb up and around and the cukes would hang off for easy picking.

























There are 4 tomatoes plants along this trellis, and they seem very happy. Two of them are already taller than the fence (and taller than me). I use a green, plastic-y tying tape that I found at Agway to gently attach the plants to the fence. We have 3 varieties of tomatoes that are slowly ripening: yellow pear, a larger slicer that will also be yellow, and 2 plants of the candy-like orange Sungolds.






























Yummmmmm.

Notes for next year: Not sure yet. I like this method so far, but we'll have to see what happens in the "heavy" months as these indeterminate plants keep growing and growing. (I learned from Youtube that indeterminate tomatoes, which are the type I have, will keep vining and growing unless they are vigorously pruned and "de-suckered." I'm trying to keep up with them!) In the past I have found that September is the time when tomatoes get so excited and branchy that they start to pull down whatever I've used to stake or tie them to. We'll see if this fencing holds up. I may need to move to industrial cattle panel.

The cucumbers are less excited about my trellising. They do not put ANY of their tendrils around the metal. Maybe it gets too hot for them? I have ended up tying the plants to the fencing, but they seem a bit sulky about it.


The arch is a little hard to see in the above photo, but there are 2 plants in the foreground that are planted on one side of the arch, and 2 plants across from them that are supposed to climb up the other side. They do not want to.
























Still, they're doing their best.

Notes for next year: I like the idea of trellising, but I need something the cukes will want to climb themselves. More winter research is in order. Or leave me a comment!

The rest of the garden


Apart from my 2 goals, I planted some other things. Like 4 squash plants which is QUITE ENOUGH. I gave them extra space this year, putting two in the regular garden, one in the herb garden, and one in the flower garden. They seem pretty happy so far.





















I planted greens fairly early (mid-May) and they've taken a long time to mature, but they're now ready. I have 2 rows of kale and one of chard. An early two rows of radishes have already been harvested, and now I'm trying some beans as a second crop in that spot.




















The garden is a nice refuge at the end of a day. I water everything every day that it doesn't rain. I give the peach tree 4 gallons of water 3 times a week to help it establish its roots in Year 1. I spend some time pulling up grass and examining the tomatoes. It's exciting to have a meal with our own squash, our own cucumbers, and our own chard. I'm looking forward to a bounty of tomatoes very, very soon.

What are you growing?

Make Magazine & Instructables projects

My my. Welcome July! I guess we're settling in to the cadence of summer. I work from home on weekdays. I do my Scots Gaelic practice on duolingo. I do exercises from Lynda Barry's book Making Comics. I go running. When I wake up, I write morning pages. I kayak by myself or with various family members, preferably early in the morning.

And I try to help my kids with learning about the world and having new experiences. One way to do this is by MAKING THINGS.

Make Magazine is very useful if you like to make things.


First published in 2005, there are currently 73 issues of Make Magazine. It's full of ideas for things to construct and try. Because the magazine is mostly projects, you can really dip into any issue and find something. Over the years we have accumulated maybe half of the issues.


Here are a few pages, below, that show a typical Make project. It describes step by step how to take an old VCR and hook it up to a food chopper to create a cat feeder.



The project cleverly utilizes the auto-record feature of the VCR to run the apparatus and feed your cat at a pre-set time.

Because of a household interest in Make magazine, we started investigating Maker Faires, which are "festivals of creation, invention, and resourcefulness." There's a giant one annually in the Bay Area, and also one in Tokyo. Lucky for us, we also found the Pioneer Valley Mini Maker Faire that we attended in April 2019. Here's a photo of the inside part of the faire.



Here we saw a vacuum robot that could pick up a ball, turn, and place the ball into a basket. We also saw photos taken from near-space by a young person who had rigged a camera to a weather balloon and sent it high above Massachusetts until it could see out to Cape Cod.

There were also a bunch of booths outside on the lawn, and food trucks, and yet more activities taking place around Smith College campus. One of them was a 3D printing activity in a computer lab. Using a free online app called Tinkercad, which we had to sign up for on the spot, one of our family members created a keychain attachment that can be printed out from the next 3D printer we run across. When we got home that day, he did some more tinkering on Tinkercad, which makes it very easy to create and save all manner of 3D projects.

Enter Instructables, a vibrant online community of makers.


Fast forward to Halloween. A last-minute decision to create a Minecraft costume entirely from cardboard led to a request for me to print out some PDFs from a site called Instructables.com. When I went to open the website, I found that I was already able to log in, because our Tinkercad account (through Autodesk) is connected to Instructables. Cool! And the website turns out to have tons of projects that are THINGS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE TO DO now that it's summer. And we have done some of them!


Project 1: Homemade puff pastries involved layering with butter, folding, and lots of refrigeration. They were impressively flaky.




Project 2: Jackie Kennedy's Amazing Waffles involve beating egg whites and separately beating the batter, then combining into an uber-fluffy mixture.



They baked up real nice.





Project 3: The DIY cat tent. Assembled from 2 wire hangers, an old T-shirt, and some cardboard, this hidey-hole is a cat's dream. Sadly, ours has been largely ignored by local felines, perhaps due to a lack of fluffiness within.

Next up: The Chicken Playground looks awesome, but we would need some chickens as well. Probably some more baking will happen though!