We are just back from our Phoenix vacation and it’s time to think about this year’s garden. Fall cleanup never happened last year because of the wetness and the sudden onset of winter in November. Being pre-occupied with kitchen remodeling didn’t help either.

After clean-up, I plan on installing 3 new raised garden beds between the walkway and the fence. I looked at kits or the possibility of building them from cedar but I can’t afford $300. per bed. After a bit of research, I determined that the currently treated lumber should be safe since the copper compounds now used are relatively safe and tend to stay in the wood.

So the plan is a quantity of 3 beds made from 2X12 lumber and concrete corner blocks designed for garden beds. The third bed will be an additional 6 inches higher, and I’ll build a detachable cover with plastic film for that one so it can be used as a cold frame in spring and winter. The others will have detachable chicken wire covers to keep God’s little woodland creatures from dining on my newly emerging seedlings and young plants. There are plenty of tasty dandelions around, so I’m not worried that they will starve. I’ll probably only add 4-6 inches of soil to each of the beds.

I might reconstruct the other two existing raised beds in the same manner if I have time.

Kitchen Remodeling dominated my life this summer and is still not totally complete. Heavy spring and early summer rains prevented the planting of spring crops, stunted the growth of the peppers and let the weeds get totally out of control.

The heirloom tomatoes produced early and well in spite of the weather with Cherokee Carbon being an extremely flavorful and prolific producer. I was late getting plum tomatoes and bought San Marzano instead of Roma from Goebbert’s. They didn’t produce as well as the Romas, but it might have been the weather. We’ll stick with Roma next year.

The peppers were very late and the green peppers weren’t very large, even at the end of the season. I picked a lot of peppers to freeze in mid-October, which was when they finally matured. The Shishito peppers produced very well and I would like to plant more next year. I got 6 plants by visiting multiple Home Depots. Sweet Heat and Spanish Spice peppers were totally tasteless, I probably won’t plant those again.

I think I prefer the purple tomatillos to the green ones, they seem to be a little sweeter.

For a garden that received little care, it did well enough and I was able to give a lot of tomatoes away.

Buying some larger plants paid off. This is probably the earliest that I have ever harvested a tomato.

Everything is planted and growing.

I have demolished the kitchen and dining room and we are in the middle of a mojot remodeling effort, so the time available for gardening will be minimal.

I am waiting for the landscapers to come and dig up the garden, but the weather has been too wet. I removed the old compost bins since they were taking up prime sunlit space. I purchased a barrel-type compost maker to replace them.

The plants are ready to go, the garden isn’t.

The July rains killed all of the tomato plants by the end of August. Eggplants did extremely well and peppers were good. Zucchini was poor. Setting out spinach and red romaine in the early spring yielded well again.

When you buy tomato seeds or plants, they are classified as either determinate or indeterminate. I knew that determinate tomatoes tend to be better behaved than indeterminate and less likely to spread all over the garden, but I never really knew much more than that, so I looked it up.

Determinate tomatoes are also called “bush” tomatoes. These are varieties that are bred to grow to a compact height. When the fruit sets on the top or “terminal” bud, they stop growing, and all the fruit ripens at nearly the same time, then the plants die.

A prime example is the “Roma” tomatoes that I grow. I grow these plants closer together than the others as they are more compact. This year I staked each plant with a single stake rather than using cages as I did in the past.

It is recommended that determinate tomatoes not be pruned, as it will significantly reduce the yield.

These types make great “patio” tomatoes as they do well in containers. Celebrity and Rutgers are two other determinate varieties that I grow, although I was unaware that they were determinates.

Indeterminate varieties of tomatoes may also be called “vining” tomatoes. These types will grow, flower and set fruit throughout the growing season up until the first killing frost. They also tend to spread quite a bit and usually require cages for support. (And sometimes a heavy stake to support the cage if they get too top-heavy.)

Indeterminate tomatoes might benefit from pruning. One technique is to prune any flowers away about 1 month before the first killing frost to encourage the ripening of the remaining tomatoes.

Was awakened from a sound sleep last night at 3 AM by a coyote yipping and howling nearby. We also have a cat and kittens in the area. They have been hanging out but stay out of sight. Neither of these animals is vegetarian, which is good for the garden and none of my plants have been touched. There were lots of rabbits earlier in the year, but they are gone. The groundhog is also gone.

The temperature climbed into the eighties during the week and was in the nineties by Sunday. After a cool wet spring, the rain abruptly stopped and the humidity has been less than 30%. Fortunately, we haven’t seen a single mosquito. The spinach and arugula totally bolted and I need to water heavily each day.

I finally got some landscapers to come and till the garden on Monday, June 5. They didn’t do a perfect job but it is ready to plant with a little raking and breaking up of some large clumps. I had them till a bag of peat moss into each of the beds by the firepit, the one next to the compost structure and the area on the west end of the garden. They also dug out a couple rows of horseradish on each end of that plot, freeing up some of that prime, sunny, soil for more productive crops. I got most of the planting done on Wednesday and Thursday, with the remaining few plants on Saturday.

Here’s the tomato rundown, first in the bed next to the firepit. These were all from Goebbert’s. The Romas were the small 4 per container size and the others were the larger ones in the 4-inch pots.

15 – La Roma (planted 3 across instead of 2 since that worked well in the past)
2 – Beefsteak
2 – Celebrity
2 – Primo Red
2 – Brandywine

I also took a trip to Countryside Nursery in Crystal Lake. for heirloom tomatoes, I bought and planted the following, from 4-inch pots, in the west end of the garden past the horseradish:

1 – Cherokee Carbon
1 – Cherokee Purple
1 – Aker’s West Virginia
1 – Mortgage Lifter
1 – Mr. Stripey
1 – Oxheart
1 – Rutgers
1 – Green Zebra
1 – Lemon Boy
1 – Chocolate Sprinkles Cherry Tomato
2 – Romanian tomatoes that Jared started from seed

2 — Goebbert’s Purple Eggplants
1 — Countryside Rosa Bianco Eggplant
1 — Countryside White Star Eggplant

Peppers in the second bed by the firepit:

10 — Sweet Banana
4 — Melrose
9 — Lady Bell
8 — Early Sunsation
5 — Hungarian Hot Banana

Peppers in the bed by the back fence

8 — Jalapeno

Next to the compost structure:

1 — Sweet Heat Pepper
1 — Pepperocini Pepper
3 — Hills of Goebbert’s Zucchini
3 – Peter Pan Summer Squash