Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
This year I’m trying a few things to reduce my gardening effort. This includes putting in an irrigation system. But mainly, this involves efforts to suppress some plant diseases and insect pests that plagued me last year. Continue reading Post G22-044: The Garden of Eden was a lousy place for testing pesticides.
This post is my best explanation of “tomatoes don’t ripen if it’s too hot out”.
Why does that need an explanation? Because I’m still getting a few ripening tomatoes, despite the heat.
After some close observation, I think the correct statement is “tomatoes won’t start the ripening process if it’s too hot out”. Once they’ve started the ripening process — passed beyond the “mature green” stage to “breakers” (see chart below) –I think they continue to ripen, heat or no heat.
The upshot is that you don’t get a nice, sharp cutoff of tomato production, contemporaneous with a string of hot days and nights. You get a dip in tomato production some days later, as the ones that have already started ripening continue. But the ones that haven’t made it to the “breakers” stage get stuck at “mature green”.
At least, that’s my best guess for what I’ve been observing in my garden this year.
(Completely separately, tomatoes won’t set fruit under excessive daytime heat. See Post G24-021, on tomato blossom drop and heat. Both of these effects — blossom drop and non-ripening — depend somewhat on the variety of tomato being grown, with some tomatoes (e.g., Floradade) having been bred to perform somewhat better in high heat.)
Continue reading Post G22-043: Rephrasing “tomatoes don’t ripen in the heat”.
Right now, Europe is experiencing a record-breaking heat wave, thanks in large part to global warming. Ask me some time about arctic amplification and the destabilization of the jet stream. Continue reading Post G22-042: There are no ripe tomatoes in hell.
In the middle of July 2020, we (Northern Virginia, Zone 7) had a prolonged period during which tomatoes would not ripen. That attracted a lot of attention, locally, because most of us had never experienced that. Questions were posed on our local plant-swap group, and the answer came back that it had been too hot for green tomatoes to ripen. Continue reading Post G22-041: Tomato non-ripening, will it be deja vu all over again?
Today I’m starting a test of two products for preventing and (possibly) curing powdery mildew. See the just-prior posts for background. Continue reading Post G22-040, testing the effectiveness of copper and citric acid for powdery mildew on cucurbits.
To cut to the chase: Copper versus citric acid. That’s what I’m going to test this year, for control of powdery mildew on cucurbits.
This post shows how I got to this end point, from my original plan of a formal test of several “home remedy” approaches to controlling powdery mildew.
Using citric acid to control powdery mildew was news to me. There are, however, at least two commercially-available mildew-control products that are little more than a dilute solution of citric acid. Roughly one-twentieth the strength of typical commercial lemonade. So that’s surely worth testing. Continue reading G22-039: Powdery mildew products, Amazon search, and a change of plan.
I was wandering around my garden this morning noticing how lush and green everything looks.
But something’s missing …
Aha. It must be time for powdery mildew. Continue reading Post G22-038: I guess it’s about that time, isn’t it? Setting up yet another garden experiment.
Above: Famous “Pickle Maze”, Hunt-Henley House, Warwickshire.
This post provides updates on:
In a prior series of posts, I set the stage for trying to produce a decent-tasting canned sour pickle, sodium-free. I established that: Continue reading Post G22-036, a decent salt-free pickle, step 2.
Last year, mid-pandemic, I put a lot of effort into my tomato plants. Staked them up, consistently pruned out the suckers, kept them to a single main stem tied to the stake, pruned out leaves nearest the ground, pruned out any leaves with signs of disease, carefully watered them to avoid soil splash (and presumably, the resulting soil-borne fungal infections). And I used an electric toothbrush to ensure pollination. Continue reading Post G22-035: The hard lessons of minimum-effort tomatoes
