Thursday, August 30, 2007

I have given up!

I had SOOOO many tomatoes just waiting to ripen, be picked and enjoyed and I have lost them all to those bloody squirrels. I hate them!!! I think I may have gotten 20 tomatoes in total all season and now I have nothing but two overgrown plants with yellowing bottom leaves and no more veggies. All that work and not all the reward I was anticipating. I need to come up with a better plan next year.
Some things that I learned this year
- watch the tomato plant and make sure the branches fall WITHIN the cage because if you wait too long then they just grow too big and fall to the ground.
- just let the zucchini grow, don't try to train it
- apply some sort of fungicide at the FIRST sign of moldy leaves. One of my poor zukes just got infested by me waiting too long
- oh and speaking of waiting too long - just pick the zucchini "one more day" will give it just that much more time to grow huge
- harvest, harvest, harvest that lettuce otherwise it just gets bitter
- daily "squirel patrol/deterrant" probably would have saved a good number of my tomatoes
- if only 1-2 peppers grow per plant (like mine did) plants LOTS of seedlings!

I have now given up the garden to the wild (meaning weeds and squirrels) because everything is pretty much done for me, except for the watermelons. Out of 6 plants I have two good sized and two maybes. All the other littles fell off. I am now focusing on Fall planting, planning and winter protection for everything. Labor Day weekend is coming and do I plan on doing some labor. I have to get everything tilled and composted before my plant shipment comes in.

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