Eggplants

The Eggplant (Brinjal/ Aubergine) flowers have been blooming for a while. They took a while to set fruit (and lets blame it again on the weather).

I spotted these white Eggplants that are just coming along. 

The Fairy Tale eggplant are also just making an appearance.

The Black Beauty are just about getting bigger, hopefully I can harvest the first one in a week.

These have been the most prolific so far, we have harvested over 5 lbs in the last 2 weeks. Wonder what one does with 5lbs of Eggplant.....

And these are supposed to be long (sort of like eggs), except that this one looked kind of weird.

Hummingbirds

The Hummingbirds are drawn to this flower (I am not sure what this one is called)

And we have been busy trying to get friendly with these lovely birds.

Peppers

The first of the Purple Peppers

The California Wonder Orange

They are way tinier than the ones I see at the supermarkets but the plants are extremely prolific. I am not sure if it is because of the mild summer or something else that we should be doing. I am not quite sure what I could do with these small peppers....pickle them maybe

Finally we have vine ripened Tomatoes

Thanks to the weather hitting the 90's for a short time last week, we have the first vine ripened Tomatoes of the season

The first vine ripened Beef Steak Tomato

And the first vine ripened Cherry Tomatoes

The veggie garden 2010-Part 4 (Planning)

This is one of those posts that has been languishing in the "draft" stage for a while. Some of the pictures of our planning were stuck in our home computer that was out of commission for a few months.

This year, Spring and Summer of 2010 has been one fraught with trouble. All our planning and prep work was tossed out the door.

Our bible for planning the veggie garden was the Santa Clara County Master Gardener resources and especially their planting calendar.

So off we went starting our seeds in pots and fretting that we probably started a week or two late.

Weather played spoil sport with our plans....by the end of May and we still were having night time temperatures below 50 degrees.

We put together some planting plans based on "Edward Smiths's book"

Here are some of our plans

Plan 1

Plan 2

Plan 3

Plan 4

What we did not plan for was the bad weather and that many of our seeds might not germinate.

We have learnt a lot from what we did (and did not do) in our veggie garden planning this year, and we are hoping to do better next year.

Harvest Monday- September 6, 2010

We finally got caught up and entered the details of our harvest from our garden note book into the computer and summed it all up. 

We are getting close to our target of 450 lbs and with at least a month to go we hope to reach our target.

All this was in days harvest early last week, with the Cucumbers being the heaviest contributors.

This was our harvest on Sep 5. Mostly Persian Cucumbers yet again. We have harvested about 118 lbs of these lovely Cucumbers so far and they are still going strong. I have been sharing the Cucumber abundance with Friends, Family and Co-workers in addition to using them up everyday.

This is going to be my first posting to Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions. Not sure if I can figure out how to use the Mister Linky widget thing....but I am going to try.

The veggie garden 2010-Part 3 (Trellises)

Our trellises and support systems in 2009 were pretty basic compared to the ones we put up this year. (Read about the 2009 trellis system here)

Our support structure for the Bush Beans was made from a #8 or #10 gauge steel ladder that is use as a stucco/concrete wall form. We spray painted it with rust proof paint, put two together and strung them around to form our very own Quick-Tee-Pee!

.....they are held together with some degradable twine.

Our other trellises for the climbers were built out of 7 ft tall 2x4 's bolted to the sides of the planter bed with 1/2"x5" Galvainzed lag screws

To give it added structural support, we put in a 2x4 across at the top using hanger boxes which make it a lot more convenient.

We then tried a number of variations on putting up the actual trellis. Our first attempt was pulled together using "C hooks" with the degradable twine going through the hooks. These aren't quite sturdy and tend to sag quite a bit. Moreover galvanized "c hooks" were tough to find.

So the next trellis that we put up was using #16 gauge aluminium wires threaded through eye hooks with a tension control mechanism (Hook and an eye) on the end.

Fortuitously this structure was in the bed the Opo Squash was in and it turned out to be good. But getting it set up was a herculean task. And I am assuming that at the end of the season it will be a bigger pain to clean things up. If it was just our degradable twine, I could cut it at a number of places and yank the whole thing and put it in our composter.

So we threaded the twine through the eyelets to create our other trellises

The Tomatoes have the Cadillac of the support systems, the Texas Tomato cages. Now that I see them growing, I doubt if anything else would have stood a chance. Though our home-made cages from last year are good, they are probably not a match for our massive Tomato plants from this year.

The smaller varieties of Tomatoes are housed in the cages from last year and the Tomatillos are housed in the store bought Tomato cages we bought in 2008 when we knew nothing about growing vegetables. You can see that the Tomatillo's have completely overgrown the cage and are also falling down.

One of our Tomato varieties (and I am guessing they are the Cherry Tomatoes) have been growing like crazy. They have outgrown the Texas Tomato cage. The Texas Tomato Cage is 6 ft tall, so this Tomato plant is about 8 ft tall at least.

There are 3 cages in this bed, but the plant on the farthest left has taken over most of the air space of the one in the middle.

Also there supposedly is a 2 ft walkway between these 2 beds that currently does not exist.

For the Eggplants we cut the same concrete form work structure used for the bush beans into 2 feet lengths and supported each plant to it using our twine

And of all...the Cucumbers got the short end of the stick. They are in our beds from last year with a wimpy trellis that was put together using some 2x2 lumber and tomato cage wire mesh.

The grass update

It has been a while since I posted anything about our eco-lawn project. We have had a lot going on with the veggie garden that has distracted us for the last few months. Not that anyone is reading or asking about it, but as our diary, one such update is long overdue. Our earlier posts are here (under the label "Grass")

First, the front lawn

This was seeded in mid June before Guru left for NJ and looked just OK when we returned. There were sections (like the one below) that were completely bald. What you see below are the small bunches that we attempted to re-plant in that bald section. We are happy to report that these plantings are doing very well and seem to be taking root. The bald spots were in areas where our "self designed and installed" sprinklers didn't cover and thereby prevented germination. We have also seen fresh growth in this area once we started hand watering these spots.

The back lawn is a totally different story

There were a lot of big bald patches in the back lawn (read here) that we reseeded in early June (read here). Thanks to the unseasonal cold weather we have been experiencing in the bay area this year a majority of the bald spots that we re-seeded showed signs of growth.

The big picture

...and a close up of the part that showed some promise

...and the one that didn't

The parts that were seeded first were also getting really long and we hadn't mowed this thing even once. Heck...we didn't own a mower to begin with.(More on our mowing story in the next post)

The shocking thing has been the brown spots that began emerging in the grass. We initially thought that  the browning was due to the reduced watering cycle we had put in place at around the same time. What struck me as weird were the innumerable small creatures that would hop when you walked on the grass. 

Thanks to Google and the power of the Internet, we soon figured we had a Leaf Hopper problem. However, the surprising thing is that almost all the on-line resources claim that Leaf Hoppers do not cause significant damage. Either we are outliers or my diagnosis is totally wrong. In my book this does seem like a significant amount of damage.

We have also seen a pretty significant number of Yellow Jackets buzzing over the lawn. Are they after the Leaf Hoppers or are they causing any damage to the lawn? Would love to hear any suggestions you may have.

So far, our method of dealing with any problem in the garden is to give things a good shower of Neem, which we did for 3 consecutive weeks. The number of Leaf Hoppers seems to have reduced visibly when we walk on the grass. We are hoping the grass recovers from this onslaught.

The veggie garden 2010-Part 3 (Exotic Vegetables)

Exotic vegetables in my world are ones that you don't typically see on the shelves of your grocery store. One of the many benefits of a vegetable patch at home is the ability to grow such exotic vegetables.

These are the ones I am growing this year

Cluster Beans (Kothavarangaai in Tamil)

Bottle Gourd (Sorakkai in Tamil, Also called Opo Squash and Lauki/ Doodhi)

Broad Beans (Patta Avaraikkai in Tamil)

and Ladies Finger (Known in the US as Okras)- two varieties- red and the regular green

Chioggia Beets

Purple beans

Yellow Wax Beans

Luffa Gourds

And Romanesco Broccoli's that you sometimes spot in the supermarket

The unknown flower

Spotted this blooming in the backyard a few weeks back. 

Early in spring we noticed some shaggy green leaves that grew in clumps in the same place. You can see the dried remnants at the base of the flowers. The leaves were quite shaggy looking and we have been thinking of digging out that area to make room for a herb garden.

These flowers looks very pretty and am hoping I can save them when we clean out the place.

And...thanks to the power of the internet and Google's search algorithms we were able to figure out that this is an Amaryllis Belladonna.