Black cherry & sungold tomatoes... soooo good. You can never have too many cherry tomato plants.

Bella Rosa tomato, more cherries, and a miniature pepper.

Mid-December Update

The tomatoes are starting to ripen! The past week I've been getting a handful of cherry tomatoes every day.

December Update: Part 3

The broccoli plant is looking good. It's growing slowly since its in partial shade.

One of the large tomato varieties (probably Virginia Sweets) in the 18 gallon bucket looks in very bad shape. Not sure what disease it has. The leaves at the top of the plant turned a dark grey-purplish hue. I started spraying it with a recipe I found online comprised of water, baking soda, vegetable oil and soap. Will be happily surprised if it comes back to life.

December Update: Part 2

The bella rosa plant in the 5 gallon bucket has only 2 tomatoes so far. A lot of the blossoms have been falling off on all the plants so I've resorted to pollinating them with an electric toothbrush :) The bees pass right over the tomato flowers and head to the marigolds and arugula flowers.


The current state of the pepper plants. They've been pretty prolific and have survived snails, hornworms and whiteflies.

The tomatoes in the ground have been fairing surprisingly well in their native nematode-laden soil. They are disease resistant varieties (big beef and bella rosa) and I notice tomatoes definitely thrive in the ground where their roots can grow deep. The ones above don't get much sun and haven't produced flowers yet.
This one is also in native soil aside from the top 6 inches of soil. The bean plants that were growing here died after several months from root-knot nematode damage, but not before producing handfuls of large, tasty green beans. This tomato plant gets only 4-6 hours of sun in the morning and has one large tomato so far.

December Update: Part 1

The tomatoes in the large containers are growing fairly well. Noticed quite a few green inch worms eating the leaves and now the tomatoes (see below). I try to avoid spraying anything on the plants but after all my hard work I do not want the small crop I have to be decimated. I bought BT (bacillus thuringiensis), an organic liquid composed of bacteria which kills caterpillars within several days. I found a dead 2-inch caterpillar today so it must be working.

First black cherry tomato! Can't wait to eat it and see what the taste is like.

The tomatoes in the raised garden bed are growing better than the ones in the containers in spite of its short height - less than a foot deep. They are starting to outgrow the cages and are free of diseases (fingers crossed).

The whitefly infestation is out of control... there are swarms of them on the pepper and tomato plants and they leave a sticky white substance on the underside of the leaves. I've pretty much given up on dealing with them. I thought of buying yellow sticky traps but not sure how effective they will be at this point.

November update

Harvest arugula, lettuce and green beans yesterday. The other bean plants stopped growing and I pulled them up and noticed minor root-knot nematode damage.

The tomatoes in the buckets are looking good overall, even with the whitefly infestation. It's amazing to see how much they've grown in just a month.

I added marigolds to the 18-gallon buckets as companions to the larger variety tomatoes.

I bought 1,500 ladybugs from Amazon, hoping they'd eat the whitefly nymphs and aphids, most flew away by the second day but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

October harvest

My first substantial harvest! A bunch of sweet peppers and arugula.

Found this corn on the cob disintegrating in the compost pile. Amazing to see how the bugs break it down so quickly.

October update

Transferred five of the tomato plants into paint buckets. Four cherry tomatoes - two Sun Golds and two Black Cherries, and one Bella Rosa. I drilled holes in the bottom, but they're so small I'm hoping the drainage will be good enough.

Basil plants that were started from a by cutting four inch stems from a different basil plant.

Bean plants that are growing rapidly despite an infestation of leaf miners. Have several different varieties but didn't label them so will find out once they're picked.

Have no idea when they're ready to be picked... They are quite fragile and several stems bent from windy days.

Finished compost before sifting. Has a bunch of grubs and interesting looking worms in it.