End of summer notes

[city_farmer]

 I'm finally picking cherry tomatoes,  cucumbers, beans and lettuce every day. There may be as many as 200 green cherry tomatoes clinging to the vines, so I'm hoping for a bit of warmth this month to ripen them up. Today the skies did not oblige. Instead, in dress rehearsal for November, they staged a gloomy 24 hours of gray rain. Perfect set up

Comments

[city_farmer]

Now I feel silly about the spinach. The reason *half* of it bolted is that I planted two different varieties...
*big stupid grin*

I'm trying to grow the potatoes vertically, in a chicken-wire cage, since I don't have much land to work with. (People do it in stacked tires all the time.) One of Seattle's 'gardening personalities' suggesting layering the vertically grown vines with straw, but that seemed too insubstantial, so I compromised with peat. I was afraid that 4 feet of soil would be too heavy at the bottom of the pile, but I think I'll go with it next time. Peat just never dries out, and I'm wondering if the vines simply rotted at the bottom of the (now 3 feet tall) pile of peat.

*Goes to look for pickled tomato recipe*

Thanks!

[city_farmer]

Hee!

What's even sillier is that while I marked that I had planted two different spinach varieties in that patch, I had neglected to specify which was which, thinking, for some reason, that it would be obvious. I'm an experienced enough gardener to know that you can't mark plants too clearly or redundantly, so I'm rather in awe of my idiocy on this one. I'll have to plant both of them again to figure it out. Doh!

It would *almost* be worth moving to Maine for 20 cent per pound potatoes...