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!

Catching Up

Here are some random photos from last week (5/20 and 5/22).

This is the west plot. A few of the potatoes in the lower left, green beans, lots of tomatoes, some eggplant, peppers, and sweet potatoes back where my husband is standing.

The artichokes have doubled in size since I took this photo 5 days ago. So have the weeds ):
Peas, peas, peas! I love snap peas! My favorite vegetable. I think we will get maybe another week if we are lucky.
The onions are coming along. We have to figure out where we can hang them to dry.
The three sisters. Two sisters at the moment. The pumpkins are growing, but the corn is not. This could be a problem.
The zucchini is thriving! I am going to pick our first pollinated zucchini for our spaghetti tonight. I will post photos later.
Finally planted the next round of okra on the weekend. Same place as last year, but I think it will be okay. My husband added lots of compost and manure.
The strawberries are doing pretty well despite being in a muddy, shady, weedy, nutrient poor, and generally ignored corner. Some taste better than others. I think we will have to dig them up this winter and do them properly next year.
I was very happy about these pink flowers (Oenothera) I often buy seed packets hoping that they are the same as the flowers I saw by the side of the road or in someone else's garden and 90% of the time I am completely wrong. This time I got it right! I think (I hope)they go wild and re-seed on their own.

Pansies are still plugging along beneath the pink flower leaves.
Our neighbors let their mizuna go to flower. I didn't realize that mizuna made such pretty flowers! We will have to let ours flower next year.
My campanula are really flowering now. I planted a mix of white, pink, and purple, but only seem to have raised purple. Oh well, at least it is my favorite color!

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.

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.

in other garden news...

I'm sorry I am just not able to update the blog as regularly as before. I am trying to exercise more, and the time has to come from some where. I would prefer to cut out household chores, or breaking up fights between the girls, or cooking. However, blogging is where the time ends up coming from.
The okra is reaching for the stars. It is getting to the point where it is very hard to harvest. Too bad we don't have any tall people in this family.
We get about 10 pods a day, which is really more than enough okra for a family of 4! Luckily, I had an okra-loving friend visit on Monday and gave her a whole big bag so we had two okra free days. It's good stuff, but I am starting to run out of fresh and exciting okra ideas. Simmered okra, okra gomae, curried okra, okra pesto spaghetti, help?
The baby trees on the embankment are coming along nicely despite the occasional pumpkin vine attack.
Tomatoes in planters survived, barely, but are sad and pathetic. We get maybe two cherry tomatoes a week. All the ones in the ground rotted in the July rains.
Even sadder and more pathetic, but trying!
We have baby kinkans on our kinkan tree. They look like marble sized oranges and are eaten whole (except the seeds). We hope to have kinkans to harvest this winter!
Edamame plants are doing well.
Fall cucumbers are planted. The second generation of cucumbers have more or less fizzled out and we are going through cucumber withdrawal with only 2 or 3 a week. Okra just isn't the same...
And finally, cosmos on the embankment! Finally, after sowing seeds seeds and more seeds three plants have come up and two are doing really well.