Category Archives: Vegetables

Aphid Alert! Indoor tomatoes–again.

December 7, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

BREAKING NEWS
Near the end of last winter the blogger known as the Manic Gardener, (a rather obvious play on her own name, Kate Gardner) wrote not one, but TWO posts about problems with growing tomatoes indoors and how she was never going to make that mistake again: she had learned her lesson, she had seen the light, she was a reformed person, a cured addict: “tomatoes belong outdoors, not in.”

Yet the aphids pictured above are on a tomato leaf, and the photo was taken today, in the home of the aforementioned Manic Gardener. What conclusions can we draw?

Continue reading →

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Indoor Gardening, Organic Gardening, Vegetables

And you thought YOU were putting on weight–

October 25, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

Okay, all you pumpkin growers, with your little gourds weighing in at ten, twenty, even thirty pounds, that's nothing. Get a load of this–but be careful, because it'll crush you if you're not. Apparently these babies can put on forty (that's 40) pounds per day (that's every day).

Image from NPR.

That, folks, is a pumpkin, grown by one Steve Connolly of Warren, R.I., briefly the record-holder world's heaviest pumpkin, at 1568 pounds, until a previously undiscovered crack disqualified him. As a member of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers, it sounds like he's found his niche, but is it big enough for him and that pumpkin?

Go to the NPR page, and you can see a whole row of monster pumpkins awaiting the weigh-off, and listen to clips including information about exploding pumpkins. I greet this "information" with some skepticism, having been taken in by NPR's story about exploding maple-sugar trees a couple of years ago. Of course, that story did run on April 1st…. And yeah, I do know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary.

→ 15 Comments

Posted in News flash!, Vegetables

Potato Harvest in a Teacup

October 20, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

I dug up the last of the potatoes a couple of days ago.

These are the ones I actually stuck a shovel through; the rest I'll wash only just before eating. It was beautiful out—in the sixties right into dusk, with that warm, low, autumnal sunshine striking through the trees.

Continue reading →

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Vegetables

Home from Newfoundland

October 2, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

A week or so ago I said good-by to my parents,

farewell to Newfoundland,

and came home to find that both crops

and livestock

were thriving in the care of #1 son, who had graciously undertaken the task. This is the fellow who dashed outside in the midst of the hailstorm last July (when winds reached 80 miles per hour), wrestling tarps up against the house foundation to forestall flooding. So we felt comfortable leaving the house in his hands.

Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Vegetables

Hail Damage: Potato double reprise

September 21, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

Several days ago I left you hanging, or tried to, but perhaps a more aggressive approach would have worked better, viz:

So now I knew that, thank goodness, I didn’t need to dig up my damaged potatoes. Or did I? (scary music)

To recap: My last post contained the research results I’d found after a hail storm devastated my potatoes in July. According to several experts who’d conducted several studies, potatoes damaged earlier in the season recovered more completely, and had better yields, than those that were damaged later. This was a major relief to me, as it meant I could leave my potatoes, all of them fairly young, in the ground, and they’d continue to grow, albeit slowly.

Dee of Red Dirt Ramblings had suggested, quite reasonably, that I might want to get those potatoes out of the ground forthwith, but since this research indicated otherwise, I proceeded to a gleeful celebration, declaring that she was “wrong, wrong, wrong.” Now, that’s the sort of categorical declaration that in any tragedy would be recognized as hubris, and like pride, it goes before a fall.

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Vegetables, Weather