Tomatoes and Zucchini

We have baby tomatoes! Here is a "father-in-law" grape tomato...

A Sweet Orange II (mini)...
And some random tomatoes plants from the west plot. Tomatoes in the front, beans mid-right, potatoes rear right, and carrots rear left...
Here's my one Brandywine tomato plant this year. Didn't get any last year, hoping for better luck this time. I find it so interesting how it has potato leaves.
And this is a Money Maker that got guillotined. I left the single remaining leaf from the bottom, and sure enough, it is making a new little shoot. I am hoping this will grow up and become a tomato plant...
And our zucchini is doing really well. Of course it always does at first, and then gets done in by a weird lumpy white stem mold. This time I have three staggered plantings, so hopefully we will have zucchini until July at least. You can see the big ones on the right and babies on the left.
This one is the most productive so far...
A view from below...
And our first proper zucchini harvest!

cool and breezy

The first summer I spent in Gifu it was over 30C (85F) from May 1 until mid October. And most of it was well over 30C. That was also the last summer I spent the entire summer in Gifu. "Never again," thought this Connecticutie. This year, however, I could possibly consider it. It is cool, downright chilly at times and we are already in mid-May. (Don't worry, Mom, of course we are going to the US)

Today was not only cool (in the teens!) but windy. Seriously windy. Majorly-regretting-having-planted-the-poor-defenseless-tomatoes-out-in-the-fields windy.

Here is our red maple in its new location at the bottom of the embankment (near the pumpkin patch).

And here are the poor defenseless tomatoes. Not only was it windy, we planted them diagonally, as I have read you are meant to do to help the roots expand. This means they were not centered in the hole. Well, this is a newly made field (thanks to my husband!) and still full of weeds. The weeds have grown since we planted the tomatoes 5 days ago, and have lifted up the black plastic. You can sort of see in this photo...
That, combined with the wind and....
I spiked it down after the fact. I know it is too late, but we'll probably put a new one in here.

The potatoes don't mind the wind. We are starting to "worry" that with so much going on above, there may not be much happening below. But given the number of potatoes that were planted, this may prove to be a good thing!
The zucchinis were whipped about a bit, but seem to be hanging in. Two baby zucchinis will probably flower tomorrow, but there are no male flowers yet. Why are the boys always so slow to develop?
And here is our future three sisters plantings so far. Corn and pumpkins. We have the timing a bit wrong. Should have planted the corn sooner. Did, in fact, plant the corn sooner, but it all got eaten before it sprouted. We will add climbing beans, too.
The cornflowers in the yard have started to flower. And Bagus likes to pretend he is in a prison with a nice view.
But we do let him roam free, see...
The chives are flowering away. These look really pretty on salads. We eat immense salads daily. By "we", of course, I mean the girls and I eat 10% and my husband eats the remainder.
One of these blue flowers must have self seeded from last year and is blooming amongst the balloon flower foliage.
The dark pink osteospermum looked like they might not survive the winter, but they did and are blooming their little hearts out now.

Tomatoes!

Well, I have been neglecting my blog for a long time and decided to change that today, so I took over a hundred photos. Needless to say, it will be a long time, if ever, before I post them all. We are leaving a for a local festival soon, so I must resort to triage, and, of course, tomatoes take priority! We planted 49 tomato plants (started from seed) this morning, and 3 more in pots. We managed to give away about 20 before and have 12 left over as "spares."

Here are the mini tomatoes:

Varieties include: Sweet Orange II, Golden Currant, Jelly Bean Yellow, Jelly Bean Red, Reisentraube, Black Plum, Sugarlump, and most of all, "Dad's" which are seeds saved from absolutely delicious grape tomatoes my father-in-law grew last year but can't remember what variety. My husband saved seeds, and we raised about 25 seedlings, 8 of which we gave to his dad to raise again this year, since he had so much success last year. He was picking them into December.

A side view:
And the planting begins...
We did 8 minis ("Dad's", Jelly Bean Yellow, and Sweet Orange II) in our yard, for easy picking by little fingers.
This is a view of the 8 yard minis from the west plot (where the rest of the tomatoes are).
And here are the big ones:
Varieties include: Money Maker, Mortgage Lifter (one has to think about the economic climate when choosing tomato varieties, you know), Cherokee Purple, Big Rainbow, Brandywine (just one), maybe a Black Krim (but it might be a CP), Evergreen, some sort of sauce tomato that I am forgetting the name of, but labelled in CG. I think it was something Genovese.

A side view:
Money Maker on the left is my favorite for taste. Only got two tomatoes last year before the plant died, so I am hoping for more this year.

And here is the tomato patch, ready to go in the newly prepared west plot (the lady who owns it agreed to let us use it, in exchange for my husband keeping her weeds cut).
And here are the seedlings in their pots, contemplating their new home-to-be:
On the right, you can see some seedlings my husband bought at the store. Why, you may ask, would you buy seedlings when you have 70 of your own??? Well, truth be told, I asked him the same thing. But my big tomato seedlings are all heritage seeds and not necessarily suited to the Japanese climate. He bought some standard Mamotaro and such. But he didn't label them and doesn't remember what he got. Sigh.

I, on the other hand, am a planner. I took about 45 minutes deciding which tomatoes to plant where and even talked the girls into having popsicles rather than a cucumber for a snack because I was two sticks short for labeling (it wasn't hard to convince them, and I was pretty impressed that they suggested cucumbers as a snack). Here are all the tomatoes in position, waiting to be planted.
And here is my husband, planting the last tomato! Hurrah! I did plant them, too, but nobody took photos of me doing it, so it looks like he did it all. Anyway, that last short row he is working on is mini-tomatoes and the rest are all big.

Golden Week

We did lots of gardening during Golden Week, which is a string of 4 national holidays here in Japan. Actually, my husband did lots of gardening. I didn't even take many photos, as I am trying to record all my classroom readers "This car is blue...ding!"

Here are our remaining tomato seedlings. We gave 12 to my father-in-law and had (sob) to say goodbye to a few of the weak, and are down to 72. We have about 40 spots, so we will see how they do over the next few weeks.

We had our first bbq of the year. It is perfect, no mosquitos yet and light until almost 7pm!

And today was Children's Day. When was a kid, I found out there is a children's day in Japan, I asked my mom why there wasn't one in the US, she said "everyday is children's day".

It was a perfect day. Sunny and warm. We celebrated by having a picnic in the garden with friends and breaking out the pool.

sprouting and flowering

Golden Currant cherry tomato the first out of the gates on March 19 followed by...
over half the Cherokee Purples and a bunch of others on the 20th.
Zucchini soil starting to rumble
Lebanese light green zucchini on March 19.
Black Beauty zucchini on March 20.
These are some cute little flowers from bulbs I planted last fall.
Anenome I bought this spring, because most of mine from a year ago didn't come up again this year.
I have had these in purple for the past two years and this past fall planted some pink bulbs.
The daffodils are just about at their peak.

Big Day in Gifu!

Yesterday was the day! The big event of the year! And I almost missed it...luckily, I married someone with a much better memory than myself. For some reason, I thought I planted tomatoes at the beginning of April last year, but no, my husband was right, it was March 1! Luckily, he kept nagging me to check, and I had recorded it on my blog. Yesterday was a perfect sunny, warm, not windy day for planting tomatoes.

This year, I convinced my husband to label all the tomatoes he planted. Last year, I labelled the ones I planted, but he didn't label his. He has a good memory, but last year he forgot which was which and this year we planted 112 of 18 different varieties, so there is no way anyone would remember.

M missed the tomato planting, but was home in time to do the artichokes (our new experimental vegetable for 2010, Cal Green Globe). Here she is sprinkling rice husks on top.
And next the first photo of our babies. 112 tomatoes and 8 zucchini in this photo.

Small tomato varieties include: jelly bean (red and yellow), sugar lump, black plum, chadwick's cherry, gold currant, sweet orange II, reisentraube. The last 5 are from seeds left over from last year, so we don't know if they will come up.

We also planted a grape tomato herein known as "jiichan (grandpa) tomato." This was our first attempt at tomato seed saving. Last year was a terrible year for tomatoes in Gifu. Most of ours didn't survive the summer and those that did, didn't produce very well. However, my father-in-law had one kind of grape tomato (he doesn't remember what kind he bought) that not only survived, but thrived and produced bushels of tomatoes. Okay, I admit, I don't know how much a bushel is, but he gave us two supermarket bags full a week from August until the end of November. They were very tasty, and were known in our house as "jiichan tomato".

Regular tomato varieties include: Cherokee Purple, Costoluto Genovese, Mortgage Lifter (I admit I got this one for the name), Money Maker (this was my favorite last year, but I only had 2 seeds, 1 plant, 2 tomatoes, but they were SOO good). Also seeds left over from last year: Black Krim, Marmande Super, Big Rainbow, Evergreen and Brandywine.

Two types of zucchini, Black Beauty (same as last year), and a new type for us, Lebanese Light Green.

And here they are in our itty bitty green house. After this we also planted cucumbers and artichokes, so the greenhouse is ready to burst. We want to get a bigger one, but have no good place to put it.

loose ends

We are leaving tomorrow and I still have lots of photos in my blog file, so here they are...One of the pouring rain days we've had every day for the past few weeks, until today which was (and still is) boiling hot.

Ready to be made into casserole.
One of my many sick (now dead) tomato plants.
New baby Money Maker. This was the best tasting tomato, so I hope this baby plant makes it.
This is a small bushy plant with little white flowers that my husband "rescued" from some mountain. It was totally attached to the ground and blocking my access to the reisentraube tomatoes. My husband finally moved it and we saw why I couldn't get the pots to budge. Serious roots! My husband replanted them along the path up to the embankment. No need to worry about landslides with those roots.The new access to my tomatoes!
Harvest a few days ago.
Our second mango seed. My husband clipped it before planting. Our first mango seed (planted as is) sprouted a baby mango tree! Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to take a photo.
My wonderful husband filled in the moat surrounding the new pumpkin vines with cut grass from the embankment.
Our only significant Howden pumpkin.
Newly potted tomatoes. I am going to try to cage them.
M washing carrots.
Balloon flowers have loved this terrible weather.