Building Tomato Trellis Structures

We are growing tomatoes in two of our six raised beds.  Bed #5 has one main row of indeterminate heirloom tomatoes plus a few more smaller variety tomatoes (Tiny Tim and Patio).  Bed #6 sort of has two main rows of indeterminate heirloom tomatoes - "sort of" because the plants are not all in neat lines.  I have a good excuse for this disarray.

My excuse is that I planted some of my dying tomato seedlings in these beds hoping for the best, and when it looked like "best" wasn't going to happen, I went out and bought some tomato transplants to replace them.  When I planted the store-bought transplants, I should have pulled the home-grown dying ones, but I just couldn't do it.  They looked sickly and sad, but they weren't completely dead yet and I told myself that I would pull them "next week" when they really died.

Well, would you believe that most of these sick tomato seedlings actually came back to life?  I couldn't believe it either, but somehow they did.  They look almost as good as the store-bought ones now.  Although it makes me really happy to see them bouncing back to life, now Bed #5 is quickly becoming overcrowded and Bed #6 has tomatoes growing "out of line."  As a good logical gardener, I should probably thin out some plants in Bed #5 and give the remaining ones a good chance to thrive.  But as an emotional first time heirloom tomato gardener, I just can't bring myself to dig up good healthy-looking plants.  What to do, what to do...

So instead of making the right decision, I went ahead and just moved forward with the plans to build trellis structures for them.  After reviewing numerous tomato support options (various shapes of cages, stakes, weaving, etc.) on the web and on fellow gardeners' blogs, we decided to do what we do best and improvise our own trellis structure using the most economical option we could find at the local Home Depot, which turned out to be 10-foot electrical conduits and string.

This is a front-view of our Bed #5.  In the front part of the bed are carrots, Patio and Tiny Tim tomatoes, and some basil.  In the middle are onions.  The back part of the bed has all tomatoes.  For the trellis structure, Keith pounded four 10-foot electrical conduits two feet in the ground (thus giving us 8-foot vertical support), and tied another 10-foot section across the top using expert lashing skills from his Boy Scout days.  We then tied three sets of strings horizontally across the four vertical poles in 10-inch intervals.  On the right side of the picture, you can also see a few vertically tied strings, because I wanted to experiment with both vertical and horizontal string options.

I secured each tomato plant to the horizontal string using Velcro plant ties.  As the tomatoes grow taller, more strings will be tied every 10-inches and the plants will be secured to the strings using the same method.

In Bed #6, we designed the trellis structure a bit differently.  We pounded three rows of four 10-foot electrical conduits two feet in the ground.  Each column of three poles was tied to a 2.5 ft section of electrical conduit for additional stability.  The trellis structures in both Beds #5 and #6 were further stabilized with strings anchored down like guy-wires.  In the above picture, you can also see some shorter vertical green poles in the foreground - never mind them, they are part of my makeshift bean/cucumber trellis in Bed #3.

Keith then created what I now think of as Tomato Jungle Gym in Bed #6.  He tied strings every which way.  Ha, just kidding.  The way he tied these strings was actually very methodical - horizontally across each of the three rows (each row with four poles), and then diagonally between each column from first row to third row.   He tied two sets like this about a foot apart, and plans to tie more as the plants grow taller.  I don't know if I described that very well, but hopefully you can see what I meant by looking at the pictures.

Here's a side view of Bed #6.  This bed isn't quite as crowded as Bed #5, but the plants are not planted in two neat lines, so this Jungle Gym structure will hopefully work well to catch and support various tomato branches as the plants grow up and out.

These pictures were all taken last Sunday, and this week has been warm and rainy in Indianapolis, so I'm hoping to see some good growing process when I get back home this weekend.  I don't know if these heirlooms will really grow up to and maybe even past 8 feet tall, but I'm certainly hoping!

Fail

 

More like Epic Fail.  Most of my tomato seedlings that seemed so happy and healthy after germination have slowly withered away to something pathetic and sickly.  Some have yellowing leaves.  Others have leaves that just shriveled up and died.  There are also some with leaves that have some darker spots, like they are diseased.  But none of them really grew after about 3-4 weeks.  I'm not really sure what killed them.  Maybe they didn't like the Jiffy peat pots that they got transplanted into after about 3 weeks.  Or maybe we watered too much.  Or too little.  Or maybe our soil mix was bad.  Or maybe our grow light wasn't good enough.  Or maybe they caught some horrible fungal or bacterial disease.

There are just too many variables here and I honestly don't know what caused most of my seedlings to die, or at least get very close to dying.  I did notice that some of the pots had a few roots showing through the bottom hole, but when I peeled off the peat pot, it didn't look like the seedlings were rootbound at all.

As a last, desperate measure, I picked out most of the better looking ones (still not all that much better than the one pictured above) and transplanted them into the garden last weekend.  I don't have high hopes for their survival because they are all still too small and the outdoor weather is still too rainy and cold.   Still, I'm hoping that natural sunlight and raised beds can work some miracles here.

If not, then I'll just have to go buy (gasp!) some transplants from the store later this month.

Ugh, if there is such a thing as mass seedling failure induced depression, I think I have it.  It's really sad to see all these dying seedlings.  It makes me especially sad to think about how so many of these seedlings were from seeds shared by other generous garden bloggers - I had such high hopes for these seeds to grow into healthy vegetable plants!

Growing Tomato Seedlings

I'm worried about my rear, er, I mean, my peas.  I thought I was doing the right thing by direct sowing my peas right after St. Patrick's Day, when it felt nice and warm (relatively speaking).  I thought the spring was finally here.  Unfortunately, the frigid winter weather came back to Indiana right after I sowed my peas, and now I'm worried that they are all toast.  I guess I will find out soon.

In the meantime, I've been busy tending to the indoor tomato seedlings.

Yes, these are all tomato seedlings, with a few peppers thrown in for good measure.  I didn't actually mean to grow so many tomatoes this year, but I was gifted a stack of tomato seed envelopes (15+ heirloom varieties)  that were about 6 years old by a Craigslister last year, and I wanted to see if any of them were still viable.  So I planted them all by throwing 6 seeds (of the same variety) into each cell of the cell packs, and wouldn't you know it, I saw germination in just about every single cell with anywhere from 1-6 sprouts.  Ack, I felt like the gardener version of Octomom.  Right now, I have multiple seedlings per variety growing under lights, but I'll probably end up transplanting only one plant per variety.  I would grow more, but I don't think I have enough room in the garden.

By the way, this is the new grow light setup that I convinced Keith to build for me.  After considering various less-than-optimum options for a grow light setup in the house (we just don't have any extra room to set up tables and hang lights), Keith came up with the brilliant idea of hanging a couple of shop lights under the breakfast bar and re-purposing a spare shelf piece (the kind for closets) to support seedling trays. At the moment, the shelf is propped up by a couple of bricks sitting on the bar stools so that the seedlings can be close to the lights, and we'll adjust/remove the bricks as the seedlings grow taller to give them more growing room.

All of the seeds were first germinated in recycled egg cartons and cell packs in our grow box.  But I discovered that the seedlings were leaning towards the light, which is unfortunately set up vertically in the middle of the grow box.

I was really losing sleep thinking about how these seedlings were growing leaning towards the light.  But now that we have a new grow light setup, hopefully these babies will grow up straight.

Speaking of babies, these tomatoes are going to be ahem, "legitimate" babies because Keith and I are getting married in May.  Of all the things to fuss about over planning a wedding, would you believe that one of my top concerns is how the vegetable garden is going to fare without us during our two week honeymoon?  Priorities, you know.

11/1/10 harvest - Fall Salad

With the temperature rapidly dropping in Indiana, the garden offering seems to be shrinking.  This week, I barely managed to harvest enough lettuce, parsley, Jelly Bean tomatoes, and one radish to make two dinner salads. 

The salads were topped with some home-grown alfalfa sprouts.  Although the harvest was small, I did have a proud gardener moment when I realized that everything on these plates came from our organic home garden (pat myself on the back).  After taking this picture, I further dressed the salads with some sunflower seeds, golden raisins, slivers of goat cheese and a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette.

Head on over to Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests from other gardeners!

P.S.  During my first year of vegetable gardening this year, I have learned my lesson that a part - okay, MOST - of the effort of keeping an organic home garden is dealing with a huge variety of garden pests.  Even after the arrival of the first frost late last week, I'm still seeing yucky pests in the garden.  I picked off (effective) several cabbage worms on my asian greens and rolled my eyes at (not effective) the aphids on my lettuce.  At this point, I've pretty much given up on the battle against the garden pests, at least for this year.  I'll be better prepared next year with row covers and a variety of different organic pesticides like Bt.  Enjoy it while you can, bugs!

10/18/10 Harvest Still Trickling In

We're only a couple of days away from the average first frost date in Indianapolis, but it looks like we may be lucky enough get through the rest of October without seeing any frost.  This would make for a very warm October for our area.  The weather was really beautiful this weekend with the daytime highs in the 70s.  Keith and I took advantage of this by taking a Saturday evening walk to the neighborhood liquor store (0.6 miles from the house) to buy some beer (the cashier looked at us a little funny when Keith put the beers in his backpack) and then enjoying a Sunday morning stroll before breakfast to admire various elaborate Halloween decorations around the neighborhood.

In the garden, the warm weather has allowed another handful of Jelly Bean tomatoes to ripen on the vine.  The plants themselves are looking pretty sorry and bare, but as long as the tomatoes stay edible, I won't complain.

In addition to the Jelly Bean tomatoes, this week's harvest included several more ripe cayenne peppers, a few sugar snap peas, one small radish and some green beans (both green and golden).  The green beans were our first harvest from the bush beans currently growing in the indoor grow box, so we were pretty excited to add green beans to the list of our grow box vegetables.

I also harvested two salads' worth of baby lettuce.  I don't know why they look so pale in this picture, but they looked normal in person.

Oh, I also harvested another serving's worth of asian greens.  I might have had two servings' worth, but the cabbage worms took their share before I got there.  I know, because I picked 15 fat and happy cabbage worms off of my greens.  Well, they were probably happy before I picked them off and drowned them in a container of water.

Bok Choy: If this is not rude, I don't know what is.

I also tackled the mass of basil growing in the garden.  Basil is probably the number one thing that grew like weed in the garden this year.  Next year, I will grow fewer plants.

Here's about one pound of basil.  I made a triple batch of pesto, and am currently in the process of air-drying the rest of the basil leaves for future consumption.

10/4/10 First Harvest of Fall Crops

The night time lows dropped to high 30s this weekend.  In California, this would be considered winter.  In Indiana, as in the most of the rest of the country, I guess this is fall. 

I harvested my first small batch of fall vegetables, consisting of some baby Red Russian Kale and a sampling of baby asian greens including bok choy, china choi (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), and tatsoi.  I'm having a lot of trouble keeping these plants alive due to serious damage by cabbage worms, aphids, and possibly slugs (the only one I haven't visually confirmed yet).  You can see a little bit of the damage to the surviving leaves in the picture above, but this is nothing compared to the damage to the non-surviving plants.

Since I didn't have any prior experience handling these hardy greens, either as a gardener or a consumer (except when they are included in a prepared dish), I wasn't sure how big I should let them grow.  I harvested these leaves fairly small because I was curious about their flavor and also because I don't trust the pests to allow them to grow to a decent size.  I've already lost almost half of my crops to the stinky pests that munch on them leaf by leaf, leading to total destruction.  I did finally sprinkle some Sluggo out there today, so if there are any invisible slugs out there, hopefully Sluggo can start controlling the problem.

By the way, these greens were delicious as a quick stir-fry.  Between Keith and me, there was barely enough to have three or four bites each.  These cook down a lot, just like spinach.  Inspired by our first tasting of these tasty hardy greens, Keith and I sowed more seeds in our indoor grow box today.  We're hoping to grow this new batch to maturity entirely in the grow box to avoid the pest problems in the garden.  I'm not sure how much room the full-sized versions of these vegetables will require, so this will be yet another grow box experiment for us.  Next year, I'll grow them all under row covers outside.

I also harvested the first three sugar snap peas from my remaining three plants that survived the cutworm attack.  They were still too small and did not taste very sweet.

The outdoor Jelly Bean tomato plants are still pumping out tomatoes, although they are very slow to ripen.  I picked a handful that had any hint of blush, so that they can finish up the ripening process indoors.  Only one Jelly Bean tomato has ripened in the indoor grow box so far.  But since we don't have to worry about the impending first frost in the grow box, I'll just let them take their time to ripen on the vine.

This post is part of Daphne's Harvest Monday.

More Jelly Bean Tomatoes in the Indoor Grow Box

Keith told me this week that some Jelly Bean tomatoes in the indoor grow box are finally starting to ripen.  Before I get home this weekend to see them for myself, I wanted to share a couple of pictures from last weekend.

Compared to three weeks ago when this tomato plant first started showing evidence of lateral growth, the plant has put on a lot of growth in terms of stem, foliage and fruit.  The stems and branches are now growing every which way that they can within the confines of the indoor grow box.  I'm guessing that the plant is stressed to no end, but it's certainly serving a good experimental purpose and proving that this grow box can grow indoor tomatoes.

Here's a close-up of some green tomatoes.  I'm looking forward to seeing them all ripe and red.  The best part about these indoor tomatoes is that I don't have to worry about the impending frost in the upcoming weeks or having another encounter with a tomato (or tobacco) hornworm.  I guess that's two best parts.  Granted, I probably won't be harvesting that many tomatoes from this plant, but the amusement value of growing a tomato plant in the indoor grow box has been totally worth it.

Happy gardening weekend, everyone!

9/27/10 Harvest - First Cantaloupe

Lupe the Cantaloupe has finally arrived in time for this week's Harvest Monday!  In case you haven't read my previous cantaloupe posts, Lupe is the first melon from the first melon plant that I grew from a seed from a random supermarket cantaloupe.  It's been exactly three months since I sowed this seed outside, and Lupe was finally ready to be harvested this weekend.  She weighed in at just over 2 lbs, so she was fairly small for a cantaloupe, but Keith and I were nonetheless really excited about our first successful melon harvest.

Even though this melon smelled like a perfectly ripe melon on the outside (what a difference a week makes), I was still a bit anxious as I cut it in half.  What if it doesn't look right?  As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about because this was one ripe melon!  It may have been even a day or two overripe, but it was still very sweet, juicy and overall delicious.

Since the weather has been cooling down and the night time lows are more consistently falling down to the 40s, I'm not holding out much hope that we'll be able to harvest many more Jelly Bean tomatoes.  It's a little sad to see all those flower clusters and half-sized tomatoes that won't have time to grow to their full potential this year, but I keep reminding myself that these plants were started very late in the season (seeds were sown in early July) for experimental purposes, and any harvestable tomato is just a blessing.

I harvested all the ripe ones plus all the others that showed any hint of changing color.  Hopefully these green ones will ripen indoors.  There are still many more smaller green ones on the plants.  I'll let them go another week and see if I can get any more ripe or semi-ripe ones next week.  

I've noticed that these Jelly Bean tomatoes come in all different sizes (not sure if they are designed that way, or if the smaller fruits were just too stressed), with the smallest ones just a smidgen bigger than the size of real jelly beans.  As I mentioned last week, these tomatoes seem to be a bit on the thick-skinned side, but they are still very sweet and delicious.

I also harvested a few more cayenne peppers from our outdoor pepper plants whose days are probably numbered at this point.

These cayenne peppers just don't show any signs of turning red, but I'm going to just let them be and see if they will ripen and turn red indoors like tomatoes.  Otherwise, we can use them green, since these peppers pack plenty of heat as is.

Keith and I spent all weekend doing hard labor expanding our vegetable garden for next year.  This is a pretty big project for us and will require several more sweaty weekends, but I'm really looking forward to having more and better garden space next year to grow more of our own food.  Stay tuned for our drawings and designs for the new garden!  I'll post them later this week or next, as soon as I figure out how to convert my design documents to a picture format.

9/20/10 Harvest - Jelly Bean Tomatoes

It's another Harvest Monday with two more firsts in our Indiana garden: a carrot of semi-respectable girth and the debut of Jelly Bean tomatoes.

We only have one square foot of carrots left, since we pulled all the other slow growing carrots about a month ago.  We pulled one of the few remaining ones this weekend to see if the micro carrots benefited from the extra month at all.  It looks like the extra time helped this carrot's girth a bit, but not its length.  I continue to be unimpressed with these carrots...

Here are the first two ripe Jelly Bean tomatoes.  One is much larger than the other, but they both ripened at the same time.  I was hoping for more than just two, but these were the only ones ready this weekend.  The tomatoes had fairly thick skin for grape tomatoes and the flavor was on the sweeter side of tomatoes.

We still have many more Jelly Bean tomatoes at various stages of ripeness and dozens of flower clusters on our four experimental Jelly Bean tomato plants.  These were started late this summer after we built our indoor grow box.  I'm hoping that there are enough warm days left in the season for a good majority of these tomatoes to ripen.  The weather has been rather inconsistent lately.  After months of brutally hot summer, it got cold really fast a few weeks ago, but now it's getting hot again, and we're expecting a high of 95F this Tuesday.  I'm sure the tomatoes are just as confused as I am.

The last part of our tiny harvest this week consists of herbs: basil, oregano and thyme.  Keith used these herbs plus lots of other spices and seasonings to make a rub for his roasted pork loin.  It became Sunday dinner with my leftover spaetzle.  If you've never had the pleasure of tasting homemade spaetzle (no, that stuff from a box doesn't count!), I invite you to view my Homemade Spaetzle Recipe post for pictures on how to make this delicious German noodle dish.  You may even be inspired to make it yourself.  If you do, you won't regret it!

Spaetzle with Emmentaler/Gruyère cheese and caramelized onions

Makings of roasted pork loin with garden-grown herbs

Please visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvest pictures!

9/13/10 Crimson Giant Radish and Kumato Tomato

While the fall garden is taking time to grow and battling pest damage (most likely slug damage, gathering from many helpful readers/commenters who contributed over the weekend), the weekly harvest continues to stay rather small.  Even so, we still had some excitement this weekend in the kitchen garden.

Our first garden radishes!  I've heard that radishes are supposed to be one of the fastest growing garden vegetables.  That may be true if you're growing them under optimum conditions, but that was certainly not the case for these radishes.

I sowed the seeds for these Crimson Giant radishes in early July.  They germinated just fine after 5-7 days, but then they stopped growing.  Maybe they didn't like the hot summer in the mid-90s during most of July and August.  According to the seed packet, these are supposed to grow to 1.5 inches across, but my radishes were only 0.75 inch across.  I would have left them in the soil longer, but the leaves were getting infested with aphids (very yucky), so I pulled these two.  The third one I pulled had about 2 inches of long/narrow red root that never bulbed up.  I don't know why that one didn't grow.  The two harvested radishes tasted fairly mild but still had plenty of "radishy" flavor.

I also harvested some cilantro from the indoor grow box and two more hot cayenne peppers so that I could make some fresh salsa.  The cayenne peppers are still not showing any signs of turning red, but the green ones still pack plenty of heat for our needs.  Since we didn't have any garden tomatoes for salsa-making, I had to rely on some store-bought tomatoes.  Now, before you shake your head in disgust, check out these Kumato brown tomatoes I got from Trader Joe's.

I did some internet research, and apparently the company that developed these Kumato tomatoes has stated that it will never make the seeds available to the general public.  The tomatoes are only grown in a few European countries and Canada by certain growers selected by invitation only.  There's also some controversy as to where these tomatoes originated and whether they are open-pollinated or a hybrid variety. 

After reading all this, I did something that any curious backyard gardener would do:  I saved the seeds.  Well, the seeds are in the processing of being saved and going through the fermentation process at the moment.  It's my first time saving tomato seeds, so we'll see how it works out. 

Anyway, these Kumato tomatoes were pretty brown/black/greenish in color and somewhat sweeter than "regular" red tomatoes.  They made beautiful tasty salsa with our hot cayenne peppers.

Please visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests.

Jelly Bean Tomatoes Growing Indoors

The one Jelly Bean tomato plant left in our indoor grow box is now growing laterally, as it has already reached the maximum height from the top shelf of the grow box.  It is also flowering and starting to set tomatoes.  Would these tomatoes be considered hot house tomatoes, even though they've never seen the light of day aside from the artificial lights inside the grow box?

Jelly Bean tomato plant in the grow box, with some basil in the background and cilantro in the foreground.

First Grow Box Tomato

More Tomato Flowers

Indoor Grow Box Limitations - Tomatoes

Our Indoor Grow Box is awesome in many ways, but it does have its limitations.  Our tomato plants are growing so well in there to a point where they are growing too tall, too fast for the grow box.  I thought it looked like a jungle in there two weeks ago, but now it's a bit junglier in there. 

The two remaining Jelly Bean tomato plants grew and reached the top of the grow box, and are now starting to grow sideways at a 90 degree angle to its main stem.  They are also looking stressed, having long outgrown the grow box shelter.  I felt so bad for them!  Since a few weeks ago, their siblings were transplanted into individual five-gallon buckets and have been thriving outside, and even starting to set little jelly bean shaped tomatoes.  We left these two plants in the grow box to see what would happen if they grew too big, and now we know.  So we freed one of them and transplanted it into a large planter previously occupied by a now-dead zucchini plant.  Hopefully it will do better outside in its new home. The other plant is still in the grow box, only because we didn't have any more large containers.  If it's still alive, I'll have to figure out something for it next weekend.

I can almost hear this plant saying "ouch, ouch, the ceiling is hurting my head!"

Well, at least now we know how fast they grow.  It's been seven weeks since we started these tomato seeds to test drive our new Indoor Grow Box.  So when we use the grow box "for real" next spring,  I'll know that they will reach their maximum grow box size sometime around 5-6 weeks.  Does that mean I have to start my tomato seeds about 3-4 week before the last frost date, to be transplanted out 2 weeks after the last frost date?  Hmm, I thought most people started them 6-8 weeks before the last frost date in our USDA zone 5b.

If you (that's you, the blog reader!) start your tomato plants from seeds, how early do you start your seeds, and about how big are your plants when you transplant them outside?

8/23/10 Harvest - Summer to Fall Transition

There have been many changes in our Indiana garden during the last two weeks while I’ve been gone.  Unfortunately, the common theme of these changes appears to be death.  Well, I say “unfortunately” but I suppose this is all part of the natural garden cycle, the inevitable transition from summer to fall.

Early Girl Tomatoes: the tomato plants have been croaking, slowly but surely.  There were still a dozen or so green tomatoes of all sizes left on the plants, but we decided to pull the plants to make room for fall planting.  I understand that green tomatoes picked at their full size will most likely ripen red.  Do immature green tomatoes picked before they reach their final size still ripen eventually?  I guess we’ll find out.

Do you like Keith's artistic presentation of our green tomatoes, plus one red?  I sure did!  That one red tomato actually ripened to that color on the vine, even though the tomato size stayed tiny.

Keith picked these three tomatoes last week as they were just starting to blush.  They had already ripened to this deep red color by the time I got home this past weekend.

Cucumbers: the bottom half of the vines look like they are completely dead - brown and brittle.  However, the top half are still green, and putting on more growth and cucumbers.  We decided to let them live for another week.

Yeah, I know, these cucumbers don't look all that fresh or healthy.  They were picked last week and they are in their it's-been-one-week-in-the-fridge condition in this picture.

Carrots: the Indiana carrots were a total bust this year, very much unlike their girthy California cousins.  Or are they siblings, if the seeds all came from the same seed envelope?  Anyway, we pulled all the carrots from our square foot gardening beds, except for one square that we left alone to see if they would get bigger with more time.

This was "only" about a third of our total harvest.  I'm going to spare you more pictures of our micro carrots.

Onions:  these onions from sets never really sized up properly.  We also discovered that one onion (from a bag of 100 yellow onion sets) was actually a red onion.

Green beans:  our late-spring planting of green beans squeezed out their last harvest about two weeks ago.  We attempted successive plantings of bush beans, but the later plantings of bean plants just got eaten up alive by the cucumber beetles and other evil vegetable-eating bugs, and the new leaves just couldn't grow properly without turning completely hole-y from bug damage.  I gave up and pulled all the remaining bean plants to make room for fall vegetables.

Zucchini: I started out with three zucchini plants this year.  100% germination rate from three seeds, so I thought I was off to a good start.  All three plants grew well and fast.  Then came powdery mildew.  Long story short, I ended up with one zucchini the whole season.  Ugh.

That’s pretty much it for all our spring/summer vegetables.  The only plants still left growing outside are herbs (basil, sage, garlic chives, thyme and oregano), some green onions and our experimental plants in five-gallon buckets:

• SUPERmarket cantaloupe: grown from seeds from a generic supermarket cantaloupe
• Jelly bean tomatoes: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Cayenne peppers: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Mystery plant: we thought this was possibly a bush-type of Hale’s Best Jumbo cantaloupe, but our more experienced garden blogger friends tell us that it looks nothing like any Hale’s Best Jumbo they’ve ever grown, so now we have no idea what it is.  We have now had at least two readers comment that it looks like a weed, possibly in the mallow family.  I am completely baffled.  Could I have been pampering a useless weed for the last two months, in a five-gallon bucket?  Yikes.  If you would like to take a look and tell us what you think, we would very much appreciate it!  Whatever it is, I sure hope it's edible. 

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvests from other gardeners.