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.