I was lucky enough to get Juneteenth off work and felt very motivated to do some work in the garden. There was a decent list of things that needed my attention:
- Two of the 4 tomato plants lacked any real kind of trellis and the 4th one had fruited and dried out completely
- The walkways had become partially overrun by overgrown mint plant ground cover
- There were lots of ripe garlic and shallot plants that needed harvesting
- Though picked almost clean by the local birds, the blueberry bushes had ripened
I set about the work at around 10am, having given myself the morning to sleep in on my day off.
First, I set about the easier task of cleaning up the walkways by simply grabbing a bunch of the overgrown mint and cutting it close to the soil level, trying to trim it away from the cement walkway. It didn't take long but I did squat to do it, so my knees were a bit sore by the time I was done with each section - the wonderful effects of now being in my late 20s and out of shape.
Next I tackled the purple cherry tomato plant, which was growing beautifully and had some ripened fruits which I picked first, but which also had some dried/dead branches and was generally just bunched up near the ground with nothing to grow up against.
I used a kind of fencing material that was used previously for some of the existing trellising. It is kept in the garage in a roll and required some light re-bending to straighten into the right shapes. I found and used an old flush-cutter to cut the lengths I thought I needed, though I confess I oversized too much for the first trellis.
After trimming the plant, I hung the fencing using some left over zip ties - some which were brittle and unusable after being in the sun for so long - off of an existing frame made of metal tubes. It worked pretty nicely! It did make accessing the back parts of the garden a bit more difficult but since the trellis hung about 2ft off the ground it made accessing the plants directly beneath it a breeze. I threaded the various tomato plant branches through the fencing holes as gingerly as I could, and then was pretty satisfied with the result!
For the fully fruited and dried up cherry tomato plant, I harvested all the tomatoes that seemed edible, even if underripe, and then I cut off everything. I cut it down to what essentially is just a little stump. From my understanding, in this climate the tomato plants are perennial, so giving it less mass to keep alive might help it sprout back up come next spring. At least, I'm hoping that's the case. In the worst of cases, I'll have to pull it out of the ground next summer and plant something else in its place.
The other tomato plant, which is still very green but not fruiting yet for whatever reason (it's been fairly dry and I've not been the best about watering the garden more than twice a week), was actually planted in a raised bed. This made making it a trellis much easier. I stuck some stakes in the soil of the raised bed towards the back, bent some more of the fencing material into a wide U-shape, and then tied the fencing to the stakes using the same zip ties. I think it looks a bit industrial at the moment but maybe my partner and I can spruce it up with some wood decorations later on. I thread the tomato vines along this fence as well, and I'm hoping it helps it grow!
I get the weird feeling that these tomato plants are suffering from scorch, since we've had a very hot summer. Maybe I will look into installing some partly-shaded netting above the trellises? Not sure, need more research. The plants are definitely producing fruit but the tomatoes seem stunted and fall off before they get very big.
Lastly, I scoured the very overgrown garden - my god the mint spread everywhere - for any and all garlic or shallot shoots I could find that were either drying out or had fallen over. I dug them up, brushed as much dirt off as I could, and set the larger bulbs to cure in the pantry with a fan pointed at them. I read it takes about 3 weeks so I will try to write an update then as well. I'm hoping they do properly cure because I would hate for all that hard work to go to waste just because I didn't know how to use freshly-picked garlic.
Didn't want to make this post SUPER long so I'll end it there, but here are the pictures of the final harvest!
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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