You Grow Girl™

Currently blooming in my garden: Portulaca, Gazania Sonnegold, tomatillos, tomatoes, clovers (really large and red and I forget what they are), lavender, plume poppies, salvia, African blue basil, Thai basil, nasturtiums, nicotina, Echeveria lilacina, anise hyssop, black-eyed Susans, calendula, thyme, day lilies, cilantro, and passion flower.

The Birds, the Bees, the Tomatoes

If I haven't said it enough, I love the bird feeder. What started out as two sparrows has turned into over a dozen birds visiting the feeder at one time. There are new birds that I don't recognize. I sit out on the deck and watch them fight for top placement, chirp at one another and sometimes even get along. Maybe I'm just personifying them but they seem to be hanging out like buddies having a party. One day we were sitting out on the deck and a bluejay came by. Suddenly we were all excited but we didn't know why. It was like an A-list celebrity dropping by at a B-list party. The bluejay only stayed a minute but we felt like our little feeder had finally made it to the big time.

You're probably saying to yourself "She must not have much of a life since every entry is about those damn birds." And you'd be right. But damnit I love those birds. Everytime I see them crank their neck in that strange bird way I'm reminded of "Clash of the Titans" and that animatronic owl. It cracks me up watching them hover around the feeder. Or when I go outside and there's a dozen or so birds all perched on the tips of the bamboo tomato stakes, or on the tiny tips of the metal spiral stakes. It warms my heart really.

Last weekend we spent two whole days mosaicing our deck table. Between that, my bird watching hobby, and all the tea drinking I do, I've noticed that my past-times have become very wholesome. At least there's still the potty mouth, the "living in sin" and my new nudy girl with light up nipples lighter keeping me just on the cusp of indecent.

But in all seriousness the table looks great. Mind you I wouldn't lay on it... or say... run my bare arms across the surface. We weren't too careful about the pieces so some of them are very sharp and raised. It's pretty, but hazardous.

Okay, I've been meaning to talk about my tomatoes for a while. As I've mentioned, I'm growing 15 plants, plus 3 tomatillo plants. That's all on my deck. At the beginning of every spring I say to myself "I will not over do it. They look small now, but they're going to be very big and they're going to need a lot of water and it will be very hot soon." And every year July hits, the sun is intense, the plants are monsters and those little monsters are demanding water. I'm hauling buckets on a daily basis, or hooking up an elaborate hose system (no outdoor tap) in order to keep them alive.

This year was the first that I've grown special tomato varieties from seed. I'm really determined to make them fluorish which is why I built the huge planter boxes and spent a fortune on good soil. Everything was good for a while and then the early girl variety got huge. I have 4 plants and they are so demanding. They kept drying out and getting floppy and then I noticed the blossom end rot on some of the fruit. So I picked up the pace on my watering and started to notice splitting on the fruit which is caused by overwatering. I consulted with the people on the boards and Jane says that I've got to do heavier waterings and cut back on the shallow waterings. The crazy thing is that a day after I did a real heavy drenching with the hose followed by a day of heavy rain, the tomatoes were still droopy. It's only those early girls. The other tomatoes are great.

Nearly all the plants have fruit on them now. The yellow pear plants are particularly huge. The tomatoes are tiny and pear shaped. Just adorable. The tomatillos are producing husks that have teeny little tomatillos growing inside. I have zero prior experience with tomatillos so I'm guessing that's normal and the fruit will expand eventually. I even have a mutated tomato. It's on one of the Amana orange plants. It was a strange conjoined twins flower that grew into a tomato with elephantitis. I like it.

So I've learned a few new things about tomatoes. Things I should have learned a long time ago. One is add some epsom salts to your water to supply your tomatoes with the extra magnesium they need. I explain why here. The second thing is about watering which I explained above.

Here's a bunch of photos of the tomatoes and tomatillos.

Last year at this time I went to The Garden City. previous entry