August 25, 2016 - Rounding the corner on summer

In mid-late summer now and the tomatoes are just now ready for picking. The weather has remained surprisingly consistent with the cool days below 70°F and the nights just below 60°F with lots of overcast well into each afternoon. Cooler than average days all around the bay and just a tad warmer than average at night. No heat waves and none on the horizon at all, in fact mostly the opposite.
The beans are still going full blast as are the peppers and the herbs. The broccoli seeds have progressed, I'll probably try putting some out next weekend, Labor Day, adding rows of kale, chard, and greens.
I'm thinking about not planting either garlic or onions over the winter as I've been less than thrilled with the results this time. The garlic harvests well but they don't seem to keep more than a few months. The taste of them isn't any more than I get at the markets either, unlike tomatoes, beans, herbs, or greens that are so much better from the garden. This would also leave me an extra box to experiment with over the winter and spring. The onions are also indistinguishable from what I can buy in the store. I keep hoping to use the spring garlic or onions but never seem to get around to doing so all that much.

The tomato plants are dying back and the fruit is starting to come now.

The peppers are doing well. I'm looking forward to stretching them out to get some good red ones for frying and pickling.

The herbs are filling the box. The diligent pruning I've been doing on the oreganos and thymes have really improved the results. I'm so hesitant to discard the flowers and tops but there's nothing to do with so much and the plant will really halt production if I don't keep at it.

Definitely planted too many beans but I'd rather have too many than not enough.

Just started some beet seeds in Box 4 where the lettuce was. Also seeded some methi in its own pot to see if we like using the greens.

August 14, 2016 - tomatoes ripening

Summer weather has remained quite temperate, the beans are coming strong, the remaining squash plant has pooped out unexpectedly early, and the tomatoes are just now starting to ripen.

I started some broccoli seeds last week as there are still no plants for sale in the nurseries. They really germinated quickly within just a week so I may be able to thin out transplant by the end of the month into Box 1 for Autumn.

Box 1
The squash is done, not sure why it pooped so early. Other than rather severe mildew which I tried to control with pruning, the plant seemed ok. We got a good harvest but it only really lasted a bit more than a month. The box has been getting drip @60 minutes 3x's a week all summer. The squash had bubblers and the beans had the drip. Now I've turn off the bubblers and cut the time to 45 minutes per session.

The beans are full on now. Next year I should plant half as many as it's too hard to find the beans within the canopy and we can't eat them all anyway.

Box 2
The cherry gold tomatoes are coming now and quite tasty.

These are the first full tomatoes to ripen, the Carmellos. Early Girls are turning as well as one of the Better Boys. Full on harvest for all plants within two weeks it seems like. As I noted earlier, the plants will stay lush with regular watering just until the fruit is ready to ripen. At that point the greenery starts to die back regardless of how much water the plants are given. It actually seems like keeping the same watering schedule at this point would be too much for the plant and would hurt the harvest so I've cut back from two hand waterings and one drip @60 minutes per week to two drips @45 minutes per week while keeping an eye on them.

Box 4
The padróns are coming, plenty of flowers but fruit is taking its time to ripen. Drip has been 60 minutes x 3 times a week, now down to 45 minutes x 3.

Box 5
The herbs are shoulder-to-shoulder in the box, everything doing very well. Drip has been 60 minutes x 3 times a week, now down to 45 minutes x 3.

I decided to put dill and cilantro into their own pots since I was having such bad luck with them in the boxes. I'll be trying to stagger seedings as long as it works. I also have some methi (fenugreek) seeds coming in the mail and will try a pot of those as well in the same manner when I get them.

August 4, 2016 - mid-summer

Here we are in mid-summer and most everything is busting out pretty well. The weather this year, unlike the past couple of years, has been very consistent - very mild days in the low 70's and evenings bottoming out mid to high-50's. However the peppers and tomatoes have been doing very well although there still hasn't been a whole lot of either to pick yet. The beans are just starting to come consistently. And although we had quite a bit of the crookneck summer squash, it seems for some reason that it's already starting to stall. I expected it to last at through September so not sure what's up with it.

Box 1

The beans are really coming out now but it's pretty obvious to me that I planted way too many. I tried setting space for four separate plantings but could only get in two. I staggered two rows and kept the poles about a foot apart and put 8 seeds per planting. Next year I should go with four at most and add better support for the poles. As for the squash, although we're still getting fruit, they are not growing quite as quickly and the plant itself seems to succumbing to severe mildew and growth is slowing down considerably.

Box 2

The tomatoes have grown so much better this year but it's just now that the fruit is starting to ripen. Again I think that a healthier plant will take its time to set out fruit as long as it has the means to keep growing, that once the fruit is set the plant changes direction and halts the process. That would explain why we got fruit as early as the end of May last year. The fruit looks fantastic and should lead to a bumper crop within a couple of weeks and hopefully last well into October. I've kept up a thorough schedule of watering - hand watering on Monday and Thursday with drip irrigation at an hour on Saturday morning with two leads into each plant's reservoir. I also fed with the neutral fertilizer back at the end of June.

Box 3

I just removed the remaining onions to store inside and will be preparing the bed for cole crops this weekend - kale, chard, broccoli, etc.

Box 4

The peppers are starting to set fruit. We got one crop of padróns so far with plenty more to come. There is still a bit of lettuce to go, I added a new set of seeds yesterday to fill in the spaces along with some beet and radish seeds. There is a new crop of beets ready to pull and the basil has done very well.

Box 5

The herbs have done very well I think due to a more diligent pruning on my part especially of the oreganos and thymes. I've had some trouble getting a good bunch of parsley going but I've had enough to work with so far. Replanting a new herb box each year seems to be the way to go from now on.

July 15, 2016 - zucchini stem borer issue

Just back on July 9 the zucchini looked very healthy and was still yielding fruit but on July 11 it was obvious that something had changed. Some of the leaves now looked like they were wilting although it was still on the same watering schedule and the temperatures had been normal. Best I've been able to determine is that it had a stem borer. Since then the fruit has stopped growing and now appears stunted. If it is a stem borer, then there is little hope that the plant will survive. I'm going to give it until Sunday but I really don't expect it to improve at all.

The good news is that its crook-neck summer squash neighbor is still going gangbusters. We've been pulling at least one fruit if not more a day and they have been fantastic. It wouldn't hurt to provide more space for the remaining plants in the box anyway.
Apparently the only way to deal with the issue is to proactively spray either Malathion or Sevin on the plant as a prophylactic measure - i.e. when the plant is first growing. I'm not planning to use any insecticides and certainly not as a preventative measure and even more certainly not Sevin. As we should continue to have more than enough squash and, soon, beans and tomatoes, I think we'll survive this and will just have to hope for the best next summer.

July 9, 2016 - early summer

Well, now, that's a little more like it. The past couple of weeks have resembled much more of a true Bay Area summer - foggy, windy, and cold. Daytime highs below 70°F and evening temps in the mid-50s. With the bay and ocean temps just outside the Golden Gate hovering in the low-50's this year, as opposed to 60°F+ last summer, we're seeing less of the atypical heat and warm evenings that we did last year. The peppers and tomatoes have been hanging in there though and should be able to get to the warm late summer and autumn weather intact.

Box 1 - the zucchini and summer squash have been doing spectacularly well this year. I've seen a bit of blossom end rot on a couple of the crook neck squash but the rest have been very healthy as have the zucchini. The plants had started growing towards the beans until I put up the small trellis between the two. Now the plants have redirected towards the outside of the box. One thing I learned for sure is to keep picking the fruit as it will grow too large to eat very quickly.

The beans are great but I probably planted too many again. I also didn't put enough supports for them so they may wind up strangling each other to some extent. We'll see but so far so good. The plants are just flowering now, we should be picking beans after another 10 days.

Box 2 - the tomatoes are doing fabulously well, so much an improvement over last year's disappointing results. I think this is mostly due to the wells I kept in the plants' perimeters, the heavy twice-weekly hand waterings (along with the once a week irrigation), and the thorough soil work I did before planting with steer manure, blood, and bone meal. I just fertilized them with the general food yesterday as a half-time measure to get them through fruiting.

My take is that the first third of growth should be to get the plants growing very healthy and green as preparation for the fruiting phase. I think that early fruiting, like last year's start in late May, indicates stress and is not something to hope for. Now that the fruits are coming out, the leaves and the overall greenery is starting to diminish which means that the plants are moving their focus from growth and plant establishment to fruit production. The plants will now start to diminish in beauty and will probably yield a shitload of tomatoes.

Box 3 - I'm keeping the onions in as long as I can before using them and before changing the box over to cole crops for autumn. This seems the best way to preserve them until use.

Box 4 had a poor result from the seedings of greens, beets, and radishes but that may have been a blessing. The plants that made it had much more room to grow and mature and have turned into a very nice yield. I just harvested the first batch of beets today and they were very good. The lettuces are now bolting but we had no lack of them to use over the past 6 weeks. The basil is also doing very well. Although the radishes are quite outsized now, the variety we planted have not turned hot at all and are still good for salads. The peppers are still doing well even with the recent cool weather. They are just starting to fruit.

Box 5 - the herbs are doing great I think mainly due to my diligence in keeping them trimmed. Apparently once they go into flowering the chemistry changes and the plants start to die so keeping the flowers down maintains the growth. I finally got chervil seeding started by moving them to a pot in the shade. It seems they are very sensitive to sun and heat. The only disappointment is the parsley which seems to have a hard time getting established from nursery starts.