Indeterminate, Determinate and Suckers!

I'm learning a lot as a first time gardener.  Like, tomatoes need a lot of space.  I started out with 9 tomato plants per two big pools.  I got a smaller pool and moved a plant out from each pool.  Then I removed another plant out from each of the big pools leaving 4 plants in one small pool and 7 in each of the large pools.  Next year, I think I had better plan on 6 plants per large pool and four in the smaller pools. 

 

Did you know there are indeterminate and determinate tomato varieties?  I freaked out a bit when I learned this and hadn’t known which kind I had gotten.  Most varieties are indeterminate, which mean they produce fruit from maturity to frost.  Determinate tomato varieties produce fruit for a specific amount of time and then are done.  Typically that is about 4 weeks.  Paste tomatoes are typically determinate tomatoes.   Most gardeners would want indeterminate varieties and enjoy BLTs through the season, but some canners would prefer determinate varieties.  Roma tomatoes are a determinate variety and celebrities are semi determinate.  I have both, but all the other plants are indeterminate varieties. 

Another thing I've learned is that you need to prune tomato plants! Who knew?!?  I know of two ways to prune tomatoes. The first is to remove all the leaves/branches from the tomato stem(s) up to the first cluster of fruit.  I haven’t gotten that specific, but I have tried to remove a lot of the branches/leaves from the bottoms of most of the plants.  This encourages air flow and decreases the risk of disease. 

 

The second way to prune tomato plants is to remove the suckers. Suckers form in the middle of a Y and are a drain on the plant. A lot of gardeners recommend you remove them. 

Sucker; 

 

Sucker no more;

 

Sucker; 

 

Sucker no more;

 

I didn't prune till late and am finding something to prune on the tomato plants every time I check on them. 

Henny Penny

There is a Facebook page for those who are gardening the way I’m gardening.  I enjoy seeing everyone’s gardens and harvests.  People are and have been successfully growing everything in these bags and kiddie pools, to include corn, blueberries, eggplant…

Keith is a biologist and great for plant questions.  He and Bud are like the best county extension officers.  Someone will post a picture of their cucumber (or other plant) and ask whats wrong with it.  They’ll get a lot of answers, but I always wait and watch for Keith or Bud to answer.  They know they’re stuff. 

There is another individual on this page.  I’ll call him Henny Penny.  Gardening is gardening.  Its changed some, but still is basically the same gardening that was done one hundred years ago.  Things happen.  Grasshoppers, hail, strong winds, droughts, monsoons, worms, aphids, brome grass happen!   I love my garden and I wish it well.  I love to see things grow, I really enjoy working in it and I’m looking forward to the harvest, but if any one of those things I just listened were to happen, oh well. It isn’t the end of the world.  Dillons and Walmart are still within 5 miles of my house.  The farmers market is still held every Saturday.  I have other options. 

Henny Penny loves to post doom day posts.  His posts always include “must”.  You must spray once a week with X and several days later with Y.  One of those sprays is Neem oil.  I have Neem extract from Walmart.  I spray maybe once every week to ten days to treat aphids.  I still have aphids, but not as many and therefore I say its working.  Henny Penny says I’m wrong.  It can’t possibly work as I got my Neem at Walmart and the only Neem that works is cold pressed Neem for sale only on the internet.  Well then, I guess my garden will be eaten up by aphids.  He also replied in response to my caterpillar/worm post that I had to spray with something specific, dust with something else and put either tinfoil or disposable pie plates around the base of my plants.  He loves to write long, detailed posts with several words in all CAPS. 

Last night I mixed up the caterpillar/worm spray I had gotten at TSC.  I inspected all the plants and I found three worms/caterpillars.  I had found 4 last week.  I definitely have them on some of my plants;

Fortunately they’re not the tomato hook worm.  Those can be deadly to the plant. 

I decided last night to inspect, remove, destroy and only spray the plants that are affected.  Henny would die!  He’d insist that the worms will spread to all of the tomatoes and my garden will fail. 

Chemicals are chemicals and while I’m not on board that all are bad (I’m totally for eating GMOs), I’m not convinced that all are safe either.  Our government once said Agent Orange was safe.  We now know that to not be true. 

I’ve decided to back off on the Neem sprays too.  I’ll inspect the garden well a couple times a week and try and catch anything bad before it becomes an infestation, but I’m not going to spray as Henny would prescribe as a preventative.  Nature has a way of addressing some issues and I’m going to let nature play out.  My hope is to post on the kiddie pool garden Facebook page this October that my first time garden succeeded without 2-3 times a week spraying, powders and tinfoil!  Wish me luck! 

I dispose the worms by dropping them into sudsy water, but my father suggested I freeze them and feed them to the brown thrashers or flicker woodpeckers that frequent my yard. I might try that. 

 

A new trash can!

I have issues with brooms and trash cans.  I purchased three stainless steel trash cans from Home Depot on Black Friday for $18, I believe.  I’ve seen them priced much more than that at Walmart and thought I was getting a good bargain.  This last weekend, I switched to a plastic, off brand trash can don’t see a pretty stainless steel one in my future again.  

 

For one, this size trash can left a good 1/3 of the trash bag unused.  The can was full before the bag.  My second issue, it was a pain in the rump to remove the trash bag and I often tore the bag on these two little things within the can. 

 

I know they sell oval size stainless steel trash cans and they might work better, fill the bag more, not be a pain to remove the bag and not tear the bag, but at $40+, I’m sticking with my plastic off brand trash can. If you're interested in the stainless steel one, I'll let you know when the garage sale is scheduled! 

Speaking of trash and cans; apply Press N Seal to the wall behind/beside your trash can to catch any messy toss and misses.  When it gets messy, remove and stick on a new sheet.  Clean up is a breeze, no more scrubbing your walls to remove gunk! 

Starting Over

For Christmas my mother received a food saver and she planned to share it with me (and store it at my house, you now because I have a nice large basement!).  I knew the first thing I wanted to try in it; taco meat!  I love Mexican dishes and I especially love cheap, whole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants.  Taco Villa, Tortilla Jacks and Taco Casa are my favorites (in that order).  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, none are on my way home or in my neighborhood.  

Earlier this month my kind parents bought and brought over 3 or 4 lbs of ground beef from Herman’s Meat Market to fry up.  Mom got busy frying all of it while I worked to put away $168 with of purchases from Sam’s club (twice annual sale on tp, Kleenex, laundry detergent, etc) and my father read the instructions on the food saver.  While down in the basement I asked my father if I he’d help me move the power cord for my freezer to another outlet that wasn’t being used.  The outlets are over my head and he kindly moved it.  Back upstairs we seasoned the browned ground beef with Williams Chili Seasoning, which I use in place of taco seasoning, measured out 2 cups of meat and sealed several portions using the food saver. I was set to quickly throw together tacos, enchiladas, sanchos, nachos or even chili when the mood set it.  I threw them down in the basement freezer and forgot about them. 

 

 

Fast forward ten days.  6:20 am on Tuesday, I ran down the stairs to grab a Lean Cuisine TV Dinner to have for lunch that day.  I had ten of them, neatly stacked in a plastic bin.  I was looking for the just the right Tuesday lunch day flavor when I realized they were all soft.  ?!?  Um, I squeezed em.  They were room temp!  Thawed!  Along with everything else in the freezer!  I glanced down and saw what was once a beautiful roast, but was now an ugly colored roast.  Bread dough had thawed and risen in its package looking like a nice soft pillow.  Oh No!  The entire contents of my FULL freezer; thawed!  I’ll have to call in and cook everything then I can refreeze it all.  No.  It was past that point.  

Was the door opened?  I don’t think so.  Had it come unplugged?  No, the light was on when I opened the door.  Was the freezer, which was bought after I moved in, broken?  It ran when I opened the door.  What happened?  I shed a few tears, called my parents waking them before they're normally up, shared the news and went onto work.  

 

My father visited that day and tested the outlet and the freezer.  Nothing wrong that he could find. 

 

He left, got home and while thinking of it, returned to test an idea he had.  His test proved accurate.  The outlet we moved the freezer to runs only when the basement lights are on.  I don’t leave them on and I don’t frequently go down there, so more or less the freezer had been off for ten entire days.  I contribute the lack of smell to the fact that the freezer was full and the basement is cool.  

Of course, my trash had already been picked up. So, I unloaded and lugged up the contents of the freezer in trash bags that my father took to dispose at his house the next day when they’re trash was picked up. 

Look all this beautiful ground beef! 

 

 

Amd roasts, pork loin and chicken, some of which was my mothers. 

There was more. It really was full.  

So, now I start over.  Its sad and frustrating, but in the grand scheme of things its life.  It isn’t cancer, as my coworker has.  My entire house wasn’t flooded, as I know some in Louisiana experienced last year.  My house isn’t being swept away by flood waters or lost in a tornado or fire.  It stinks, but lesson learned.