Holy merde it was hot out there today. Yeah, we could have gotten out of bed somewhat earlier but then there wouldn’t have been all that sleeping…
On the agenda today was filling the new boxes (which Husband did, and for which I worship him), feeding everything, adding support poles where needed in the beans/tomatoes, digging out and replacing the mass of soil where the poor Black Plum tomato expired, pulling weeds out of everything (because we live in the freakin’ tropics), and adding dirt to the potato bins, where the plantsies were getting a bit tall:
Skipchat has it if you allow the stems to get too much sunlight then they become actual stems and aren’t capable of producing potatoes. How much is too much? You got me, this is all a big experiment for us, and something like that probably depends on the variety anyway.
On the harvest side of things, today was The Day for harvesting the second pumpkin (first was 2 weeks ago, and 37 lbs). I guessed 50 lbs, and am notoriously bad at this sort of thing, but when Husband weighed it the thing was indeed 53 1/2 lbs.
Something that big ought to have a freakin’ name. We don’t really eat pumpkin-y things around here – we’re only growing them because #1 Son picked out these seeds at the garden center – so it is destined to become toasted pumpkin seeds and major compost enrichment.
Also harvested were 1 red bell pepper, 2 jalapenos, 4 paprika peppers, 14 Orange Paruche tomatoes, 6 Black Cherry tomatoes, and 6 ears of Country Gentleman Shoepeg corn.
The kernel development on these is MUCH better than on the last crop we tried (yay, hand pollination!), and the earworm incursions limited to two tips. And then only because we have not sprayed Bt in the past two weeks.
These are destined for a pot of homemade chili, along with the rest of last year’s red rice beans. *drool*
Looking forward we’ve got fruit on every one of the 20+ varieties of tomatoes, all the pepper plants (red bell, whitney, padron, ancho, tequila sunrise, jalapeno) are groaning with fruit, the Gold Baby watermelon is duking it out with the pumpkin vine over ownership of the backyard, the Swan Lake vine is finally fruiting, the second planting of edamame is blooming, the Black Valentine and Anazasi beans are podding all over the place, the Key Lime tree has eensy limes all over it, and the fig tree is finally fruiting again.
It’s a nice time to live at my house, I tell you.