I use those three-sided cage thingies, but have to drive 1" x 1" x 6' stakes down through each “corner” when the plants get to be 5' tall, or else they blow over like anything else. I use the round wire tomato supports for the tomatillos, since they're a little less rangy, but have to stake them, too.

Do you girls grow your tomatoes in clay or plastic pots?

I have mine in plastic pots on a roof and my landlord has been threatening to shut down my whole gardening operation. When I hear yumyum talking "cement shoes" I get all queasy picturing my tomatillos crashing down on my neighbors.

That is the exact container that I have.

re: over-winter storage:

the fencing cages I made, I just threw up on top of the almost-flat garage roof until the next season

the wooden frames were fastened with wingnuts and bolts, so would disengage easily and stack

One of the tomato plants I bought – marked “Brown Cherry” – was supposed to produce small mahogany-colored cherry tomatoes. I think it must have been mis-marked, as it's producing large plum-shaped fruit. No matter – I love garden surprises. Last year I bought a six-pack of green cabbage plants, and they turned out to be cauliflower (which I discovered one day when I pulled back some leaves to check for cabbage worms and found big, white heads).

I am amazed. Even with the heat, my tomato plants are still setting fruit. I would think the heat stress would cause the blossoms to drop.

I can't control nature.
I can't control nature.
I can't control nature.
I can't control nature.

Deep breath.

Last night I'm making dinner and I look out the kitchen window to see a brazen squirrel lounging in one of my planters feasting away on my tomatoes. He's just looking at me with a "so what are you going to do?" look on his furry face. I run to the window, throw the screen up and he slowly saunters away, pissed off that I've interrupted his dinner. This happens three more times before I despair and I decide to go all chemical on his ass, spraying a toxic "Varmint Away" concoction all over the fruit. This does not deter stupid bastard! So while maybe he'll acquire cancer in five or so years, what does he care??? His life expectancy is like 3 years max.

At this point I've become The Crazy Squirrel Lady, actually lying in wait at the window with a squirt gun.

I HATE SQUIRRELS.

I sympathize, Abby. This year we have squirrels, skunks, a groundhog and a family of raccoons all competing for our veggies. If we had installed one of those motion-activated squirters, I think the plants would have died from over-watering.

Fly

Abby-- I have been there when I grew tomats on my balcony. I know the frustration. Maybe you can attach bells to your tomato plants that will scare him off. Probably not--most squirrels are brazen psychos.

As you know, I am the crazy squirrel lady. That is when I'm not being the crazy racoon lady or the crazy carpenter bees lady.

All I can say is my money is on YOU. You are persistent and not above using poison. I assume the red pepper isn't working?

Nope, apparently the fat squirrel likes his tomatoes spicy. I can only imagine what my neighbors think of me bolting in and out of the window with all kinds of spray cans, spice jars and squirt guns.

Mykong -- I suspect that I could attach an A-Bomb to the plant and the squirrels would still percervere.

Wonder if the chocolate poison trick works on squirrels? For those playing along at home, racoons really like chocolate but it makes them sick. I had some very intrepid critters in my pond and so I set out Hershey's kisses at night. They came the first night and et them. They came a second night and et them. They've not been back since. I guess they know where they got their "bad" food and they don't return. Perhaps it would work on the rat bastard squirrels? It's worth a shot.

we finally found a decent landscaper who did the front and back yards of our house.
we built a 30" high stone planter around the patio; now i can plant different stuff there, so today we drove to several nurseries where i got zinnias, coriopsis, cosmos and couple of other flowers as well as marjoram, tarragon, sage and lemon verbena...
oh and nice tiger eyes (golden-leaved sumac).

my biggest tomato plant (stripe heirloom) has been growing strong since day one (almost 3 months now) but has yet to produce anything. i can't quite figure out why. there are flowers that have sprouted recently, but nada... granted, i'm living in the sunset district of sf which is now somewhat grey and overcast, if not foggy 4/7 days of the week in the afternoon.

any ideas?

so far the only things growing well are fennel (which grow like weeds out here), cilantro, parsley, zucchini, basil, potatoes, and a few others...

After not picking the cherry and grape tomatoes since thursday, this morning I had 112!!! On 8 plants...when I was on the third plant, I had to count what was in my basket, because I couldn't stop laughing at the sheer quanity of them!

Had corm and tom/moz/basil salad for dinner, plus my first time ever home made peach sorbet...
now I'm thinking...tomatoes, new IC maker..hmmmmm

In the past, I've created conical tomato towers with 36 inch high fencing wire and two fence stakes for stability. About two feet wide at the base, filled with compost and grass clippings. Thoroughly wet the compost and the ground once per week, use excess clippings to protect the soil from evaporation. Clip the branches to the stakes and fence.

Works wonders, and the fencing disassembles for easy storage. The compost mix gets worked into the garden

Uh oh.

The tomato plants are burning up -- the leaves all yellowing, even though the fruit is ripening and the "harvest" is going well. (Those sungolds are so sweet they're like candy.)

But I digress.... both tomato plants and tomatillo plants looking like hell. Anything I should be doing to save them/extend their life? Is it just that time of the season?

Overwater. Underwater. Gawd, how can I tell? We had a heatwave here in Boston and I thought I maybe didn't water enough. Now I'm being religious about it. Maybe too religious? Do they need to completely go dry as a bone between waterings?

Well the Abbylovi garden hilarity continues.

Tomato plant #1 has been stripped of all tomatoes by the fat resident squirrels. My squirrel-hatred is bottomless.

In between dreaming of ways to kill squirrels, I'd ordered a garden spike to support my tomatillo plants. Since I have no doorman, this arrived at work a couple of days ago and now my co-workers come by to laugh and point at my 6 foot spikes. You see they have already jumped ahead to the inevitable conclusion, which I did not. I will have to bring these things on the subway and given the latest in subway security, I cannot imagine telling a cop that the reason I'm lugging these sharp spikes is because I'm farming tomatillos on my roof.

Abs -- so sorry about the tomatoes. Really, really sorry. And I can just imagine the shock/awe on the subway when you take your spikes home.

GG -- thanks for the tips on watering. I do *not* recall this being such a tenuous hot-house flower kind of balancing act last year (my maiden year of tomatoes). My tomatoes are obviously in the pussy category this year. I just need to keep the toma's alive until I can see if I get something inside of their little paper balloons.

The good news is, it gives me plenty to be obsessed about now that the racoons are not pestering my pond.

I can barely type these words, but Bob left the gate to the garden open a couple of nights ago and the deer ravaged it. Most of the grapes, gone. All the tomatoes, ripening, gone.

I should hate the deer but I can't. They're just deer.

I was sick about this when he told me.

tomato plants are beginning to look worse. one plant is dying. this foggyness is pretty bad at this time of year. it feels like october weather here... it's such a contrast from the other side of the city which is sunny. at least i'm figuring out what grows ok in this area - it's my first year living on this side of the city.

Last year we had a lot of wet weather and the tomatoes didn't like it at all, but the peppers were spectacular, so that backs up GG's info.

This year so far we had a nice balance until fairly recently, when it's been hot and relatively little rain. We have a lot of fruit on most of the tomatoes but no ripening yet. The cherry tomato is producing nicely but the leaves have all yellowed. The peppers are fruiting well but slowly. The cukes were going great but have slowed in the heat. I have a TON of basil and swiss chard. Huge squash vines and lots of blossoms but few actual squash as yet, which I expected (all acorn squash). The herbs have gone apeshit, especially the parsley and tarragon. The beans are slow this year but we got them in later. Experimenting with some different lettuce this year and it's been spotty. Carrots - my first time growing them (Little Finger variety), they're in a container and seem to be doing okay.

Fly

Oh happy day! I just harvested a (small) bowl of beutiful orange and red cherry and plum tomatoes. They are sweet as can be and still warm from the vine. I wish I had a digital camera, I'd post pictures of the little gems. I'm so chuffed I can barely stand it.

Been busy, and so not reporting. Last week, sowed more lettuce, arugula, mesclun and mache, more beets, carrots, fennel, basil, cilantro and haricots verts. Thanks to a three-day break from the heat, everything's germinated.

Some recent pictures...

Garlic harvest, hung to cure. Each bundle has between 10 and 20 heads:


Happy Valley:


First carrot crop harvest:


A couple of mutant carrots for Tana. Sorry, no penises this time.


Stuff picked this afternoon for tonight and tomorrow's dinner:


Tonight we're having steak on the grill and corn from a local farm. I'll use the tomatillos and jalapeños to make a quick sauce for the steak, and sauté the haricots verts with a little garlic. The cherry tomatoes will make a quick salad with a cuke from a neighbor and some basil Hub bought inadvertently, thinking it was baby greens. (Our greens got totally out of control with the heat, so I've sown new, but for now, we're without.)

Tomorrow night, I'll stuff the eggplant with its own flesh and a mix of pattypan squash, tomato, poblano, onion, garlic and pinenuts. Served alongside “braised” broccoli raab.

Oh wow, that would be awesome! I get his emails too. But he might like gardenweb better though I haven't been there since it changed hands (a while ago)

I just started getting the 2006 catalogs. I have to say that I love Cooks Garden (pretty catalog) but my fave catalog has no color pics. Fedco Seeds, damn they rock. They only get seeds from small growers (no Monsanto!) and in fact there's this big diatribe against Monsanto on the inside of the cover. They sell a hell of a lot of varieties. Their seed packets have lots of seed and are very cheap. What more could I want? Oh right, I wish I actually had a garden again, that would be nice.

--Tell him I love step by step organic gardening. and that newer version of it, forget the name.

I am stoked: one of my clients has a wholesale nursery in addition to his regular nursery and demonstration gardens which are open to the public. He's putting his entire plant database online this winter: he's got an amazing collection of proteas and other unusual plants.

This is a picture of how my garden looks today













(from 2" to 18" of snow)

We're in the "getting-started" phase of our new garden. Actually, it's more like the the "interminable wait" phase, but I'm trying to keep positive.

When we bought the house, the yard looked like this:

It really doesn't give you an idea of how overgrown the trees were, how dank and opressive and utterly barren it felt. But suffice it to say, it wasn't a happy place to be.

The view from the main-floor deck looked like this:

There's a bay out there somewhere, but you'd never know it.

After talking with our landscape designer and three arborists -- I was supremely reluctant to bring down living trees -- we decided to remove the three-story-tall bottlebrush, the dangerously top-heavy avocado (hidden behind the bottlebrush in the view shots), and the "junk" fruit tree, and leave the magnolia (not shown) in place.

Well, they're all out now, and we've got glorious views and light. We also discovered we have TWO magnolias -- one white, one pink -- right next to each other, so it looks like a tree with multi-colored blossoms.

We're waiting for the bids on the decking and hardscape construction to come back before we make too many planting decisions, but we know that we're going to be replacing the trees we removed with other food-bearing varieties, and adding a lot of herbs in the low-lying beds and shrubs.

Here's the initial design:


Some things will change (we've already opted for a smaller patio, bigger tiles, specific trees and plants) but this is the general idea. The paved area on the right is the dog run.

I can't believe how excited I got when I saw a new post in this thread - just thinking about the upcoming gardening season makes me smile (it's snowing again. I know, Blame Canada!)

That plan looks lovely - and you'll get to see the hitherto mythical bay! What kind of water feature are you thinking about (that does say water feature, doesn't it?)

Fly

It does indeed!

It'll probably end up being some sort of burbling doo-dad. Probably not a fountainy thing, more like a decorative pot with a bubbler in it. We haven't gotten that far.

The patio stone will be 24-x-24-inch black slate. And the dog run will be shaded by rustic iron arches, probably with lemon verbena growing up and over. I'll dig up some more of Katey's design sketches when I get home and post more about the fence and the screen at the back of the yard.

Trees will include: bergamot orange, kaffir lime (probably potted), olive, cherry...
Shrubs: Sage, bay, lavender, rosemary...

Here's my garden today:















We had a record warm January, but February has been "normal", so there's still 4-12" of snow on the ground.

SB (including a fresh 1-2" today)

Anita, I'm jealous.

Question for the thread: My rosemary now has a powdery substance on it. What have I done to it and how can I make it better?

Well, today's been fun.

We got the estimates back from the landscaper and the deck guy. Adding in our designer's fees, we're at 230% of budget.

We'd really hoped to start work this month. We're gutted, and we're living with a yard that looks like a war zone... and presumably now will be for months, because at this stage we don't even believe that we have a buildable design.

Needless to say, we are VERY pissed at our designer.

First, the good news:
Here's our view, with all the trees gone!


It's a little less exciting when you're looking at the actual yard.


But we did have a few blossoms on the magnolias, at least before the hail this morning:

In preparing to start my seed orders, I just went to the cupboard where I keep my seeds to do an inventory. Mice have made the cupboard their home for the winter. Not only have they nibbled the corner of every seed packet and either eaten or strewn the contents, they unwound nearly an entire ball of string and spread it around for nesting/bedding. If it weren't so annoying, it would be almost cute.

I've left the cupboard door open so Stella The Magnificent (cat) can do her thing.