AAA Sweet solano

December 2014

Baby bok choy

New raised bed with baby bok choy and swiss chard

Broccoli, swiss chard, kale, bok choy

Poblano pepper

Lacinato kale

Bok choy & swiss chard seedlings

Papaya tree started from seed

Mango started from seed

Bell pepper plant bought from store, only producing one pepper. 

Still have yet to have great success growing peppers.

Poblano pepper, store bought. So far, the second pepper growing. Looked deformed and diseased until added a layer of homemade compost and then finally new growth started appearing, looking much more healthy. 

Lemon started from seed! Hope it produces lemons one day... Also on my wish list of trees to grow: Orange, starfruit, papaya, grapefruit. 

Cukes

Kale on left (still growing in this heat!), French marigolds, and no-idea-what-the-flowers-on-the-right are called.

Broccoli gone to seed on left, kale in foreground.

Random tomato plants keep growing in the ground from tomatoes I left to rot; none of course produce anything because of terrible soil and root-knot nematodes.

Compost, baby!

Tomato plants roughing it out in the hot sun.

Bad idea planting spinach and lettuce at this time of year :)

Random potted plants. See if you can spot 'em. Oregano, thyme, marigolds (haven't bloomed yet), starfruit seedlings (why do they germinate and then stop growing?!), tomato seedlings growing with some random vine plant. 

Dill gone to seed

Dino Kale!

Some hot pepper variety, free thanks to the helpful gardener forum

Poblano Pepper

Warning: extra crappy photos due to my old 1mp phone camera. 

Just noticed this growing out of the compost pile and it looks to me like a papaya tree. 

Still getting a nice amount of tomatoes, although very heavily scarred. 

Whenever there are too many tomatoes I make some tomato sauce with fresh pasta.. soo good. Discovered that making pasta by hand really isn't that difficult. It takes about an hour from start to finish, no machines or gadgets necessary. All you do is mix flour and eggs together, let the dough rest for 20-30 minutes in plastic wrap, roll it out as thin as possible, and slice into fettuccine. Boil it for two minutes and voila! Fresh, yummy pasta. 

There are so many videos you can watch online to see how its done, if you have the time it's worth it. Personally I like the physical aspect of doing it by hand rather than having machines do all the work. Build some arm muscle the old fashioned way :) 

As you can see, the pasta is quite dark in the photo above. I tried a mix of half whole wheat and half white and it surprisingly turned out  fantastic. And it's regular flour - not even pastry flour. The fun thing about making pasta is the endless options. Previously I blended kale + basil + oil, added that to the dough, and it was a beautiful green color and added an extra hint of flavor. 

February Additions - Herbs, Kale, & the beginnings of some fruit trees

First time growing Kale and its looking awesome!

Super excited to be growing quite a few trees, all started from seed. On the right is mango and on the left is lemon.

A poblano pepper plant I purchased from the store. Hope its not too cold right now for it.

Adding to my herb collection... sage and rosemary in the back on the right (further  back is oregano).

Left and front: lemon plants    Right: Orange plant

Lemon plant

Tomato plants going wild and crazy. Lots of tiny fruit worms have descended on my poor plants. 

I would say we've gotten at least 20-25 pounds of tomatoes thus far.

Disease that's been spreading?

Bought some flowers for the bees.. right is bok choy.

The single surviving broccoli plant on the left, two small kale plants in the center. 

Close up of the bok choy. 

The tomato plants in the larger containers are getting a little out of hand, to say the least.

Fruits of labor

Lovely French Breakfast radishes & sungold cherry tomatoes

Lots of cracks after heavy rains.

Nice and bushy now :)

Purple spotted leaves have appeared on all the plants.

Some weird disease that afflicts a couple of my plants every year...

As you can see, the tomatoes I'm growing this year (Red and Green Zebra heirloom tomatoes) are very susceptible to cracks and scarring - nearly every single tomato I've picked is cracked. It's been raining a lot which doesn't help. 

Honestly though I don't care because they taste so damn good. Like a million times better than those hard Publix tomatoes that are "ripened" with gas and taste pretty bland. These are juicy and meaty and sweet. 

Since I've been harvesting roughly 10 tomatoes every few days, and we can't keep up with eating them at that rate, I simply cut around the cracks and scars to prevent mold from growing and store them in a glass container in the fridge. Whatever is not eaten within 1 weeks time I'll turn into a sauce and freeze.

Also, after lots of delaying, I finally purchased a pressure sprayer. Before I was using those horrible spray bottles from home depot at $3 a piece. One broke after using it twice. And trust me when I say your hand will hurt after spraying 10 plants with it. I literally stopped spraying my plants since the spray bottles were such a pain in the ass.

I used the pressure sprayer for the first time today and it was AWESOME. Finally sprayed the plants with an organic copper fungicide and next time the plants are overrun with caterpillars I've got BT on hand.