Philip and Jenny Cain

I need to preface by saying that yes, the fact that anything is growing at all is a success.  However, through my tye dye colored lenses, I’m evaluating the time invested and the spaced used (which is very limited).  That is all.

Tomatoes! Cherry, Porter, Golden Jubilee, Beefsteak, Green Sausage, Black Cherry. Everyone knows how good home grown tomatoes taste. I learned this year the correct way to plant tomatoes for Tucson summers. You pick all the leaves off except the very top ones. Then you plant the entire now-bare stalk underground too. That stalk will grow roots instead of leaves, and your root ball is way down deep in the nice, cool soil. When the soil here heated up to 90+ degrees in June my tomatoes were just fine and still producing. The frustrating thing with these is they were slow to produce. I transplanted these in April and should’ve had some production by end of May or early June, especially with the cool spring we had. But they didn’t. They didn’t start producing til the end of June, which is usually when they stop their first production and wait until the monsoons come.  Then they will produce their second round into the fall.  I have 12 tomato plants, and all I have had is two handfuls of tomatoes (which were sooo delicious and make me sad I don’t have more).  I will probably get a nice fall crop. But to plant in February and wait until fall to get tomatoes? That’s ridiculous.  And I know I did everything right.  So this is very disheartening to me.  As far as a summer crop goes, this is bountifail.

To be continued…

I started off in spring on the right foot. After many errors in the past year, I ready to put into action what I had learned. I bought the correct soil (I had been using too hot of stuff and burning my seeds and plants). I strategically plotted out where to plant things instead of just randomly adding things in as I went along because I was excited. I knew which plants wanted more sun (squash, cucs, eggplants, peppers, watermelon, okra), and which ones would prefer some afternoon shade (tomatoes, beans). I limited my planting of sunflowers and zinnias so as not to shade out plants like last year. I started my eggplants, peppers and tomatoes indoors in February to be ready for a transplant in April. I double dug all my beds a foot down instead of just putting soil on top of the ground. I thought vertical, and used as much uppity space as I could. I put trellises and poles for all the climbing plants. I even added another garden plot in the corner yard so that my crazy vines could take over the wall there instead of all over my garden. Things were looking very optimistic.

I wanted to do a little mini series to share my gardening journey.

The first contender of “Are you full (of produce) or are you a fail(ure)?” is….

Peppers. Peppers, peppers, peppers, peppers! This one is a baby poblano, but I have peppers coming out my ears! And they taste soooo good too. All of mine are sweet or mild, since I do not like spicy. I have Bell, Banana, Anaheim, Joe E. Parker, and Pasillo Baijo, and (the afore mentioned) poblano peppers. And boy, are they TASTY!! So much flavor. It seems that all of them are synced and produce all their peppers at the same time. So I get these waves of peppers all at once. One thing I also learned last year – the freezer is my friend. I chopped those puppies up and put them in the freezer, and then I pull some out when I want. And the flavor still is there! And there is actually nothing negative to say about these. These are, hands down, my most successful, bountiful plants.