First Cucumbers, More Tomatoes

We are starting to get temperatures in the mid-nineties now with 102 forecast for Sunday. Usually this time of year, we ahve had several triple-digit days. The wonderful Blenheim apricots which are now ripening don't have pit-burn this year. We were lucky with this variety this year.

Pictured below, our second cucumbers from the garden (we ate the Cool Breeze before taking a picture).  The ridged one in front is Suhyo TK.  The one in back is our standby, Summer Dance.  Also pictured are some new tomato varieties. Along the edge of the plate above the Summer Dance cucumber is Rosalita. To their left, a heavily-ridged, squat Aunt Ginny's Purple with blossom end rot on the bottom where you can't see it. Beneath are two Early Challenge fruits and between the cucumbers is a plum-shaped Barbara fruit which probably could have stayed on the vine another day. IDs continue below the photo.

Beneath the blossom end of the Suhyo TK cucumber is a little Fourth of July fruit and our largest fruit so far, other than Cosmonaut Volkov, First Lady II. Lined up against the cucumber are three Berkeley Tie-Dye fruits. You may not be able to see the stripes, but there is some faint striping. The smaller fruits in front are Yellow Submarine, Black Cherry and Pop-Ins.

The plate is next to one of F's squash plants. He seems to have planted them where they will overtake many of the plants we planted. He believes that any seed which naturally sprouts in the garden will produce better than a "foreign" seed. At one time, when people planted single varieties, this may have been true. But we get some strange squashes from the F2 generation, offspring of hybrids from the year before.

First Cucumbers

Cool Breeze: Short, stubby gherkin, probably a little larger than you would pick for sweet pickles. Light color. Very crispy, sweet. The plants are not happy where they are planted. Don't think I will get many more fruits. Produces before many other varieties, but is not a heroically heat-tolerant variety like Summer Dance.  It needs to be grown on a trellis here.

Suhyo TK: Deeply ridged. Did not peel. Trace of bitterness at stem end, astringent (not in a particularly  unpleasant way, tender). Would be a good variety for making cucumber facials.  Would probably have some bitterness in hotter weather.  This is a tough climate for cucumbers.

Summer Dance: As usual, sweet and tender even with the skin on. No bitterness. A great cucumber for our climate.

More Tomato varieties, following up on our first harvest

On June 18 I picked:

Cosmonaut Volkov: A good-sized tomato, tasty and mildly sweet with light red flesh. Peeled easily without blanching (so did a fully-ripe Fourth of July). Assuming that a certain toddler didn't switch the labels when we planted this section.

First impression of tomatoes picked June 22 and 23:

Pop-ins: Variable red pear or teardrop type, bigger than typical yellow pears. Juicy, pleasant.
Rosalita: Rosy grape tomato with tiny white dots. Sweet, nice fruit.
Yellow Submarine: Bigger than the typical yellow pear. Flavorful.
Black Cherry: Very flavorful. Gel around seeds is green, as expected. I liked the fruits with a touch of green on the shoulder best. Lots of "black" tomatoes are ripe when they still show some green. There was no cracking. This variety is known to crack in some conditions.

First Lady II: Hard to peel when raw, OK for an early tomato, kind of bland.
Early Challenge: Smaller than First Lady II, easier to peel, slightly tastier
Berkeley Tie-Dye: Not as much striping as I expected. Gel around seeds is tart, as expected. Soft flesh. Not as flavorful as I expected. Maybe too ripe?
Aunt Ginny's Purple: Not ripe - picked early because of blossom end rot.
Fourth of July: Fruit ripened in warmer weather is sweeter than the first fruit we got.  In my past experience, the flavor of this variety has stood out when the weather got hot.  Fruits are relatively hard to peel raw unless very ripe.  This is a shame, because the skins are tough.

Update, June 26

Stone Fruits: Yesterday, Marcela came by for some spricots. The little fruits from my volunteer tree are flavorful, sweet-tart and firm, sometimes a little tough or crunchy. Seems more and more like the offspring of a commercial variety. Golden Amber is big, very soft and flavorful. Softer and bigger than Blenheim. I'm not so sure that it's immune to pit burn, as described in catalogs, but it's a good late apricot.  We didn't get much of an extended harvest this year due to rain during the bloom season.

Today, I picked a peck or so of Blenheim apricots - luxurious this year with more moderate temperatures. Temperatures are warm enough - mid-nineties - to sweeten up the Arctic Star nectarines. The soft ones are really sugary now.

The Santa Rosa plums at the side of the house are ripening, before the few Flavor Supreme Pluots, which normally start ripening first.   Santa Rosas are a jolt of tangy flavor, -- too flavorful for some modern tastes.

Cucumbers and squash: I picked a bunch more Summer Dance cucumbers today - smaller than you would see them in the store. More luxury. Not much going on with the other varieties. Lots of squash on now. Magda is prolific. Diplomat and Kojac are both nice, standard green zucchinis. I pulled up a couple of F.'s volunteer plants which had turned yellow.

Tomatoes: More varieties ripe for the first time this year:

Boondocks Mystery: The mis-labeled Boondocks plant turns out to be a mid-sized clear yellow tomato. Somewhat tart. Plant is diaseased, may come out soon.

Brandy Boy Mystery: The second plant with a purchased plant of Brandy Boy turned out to be a big, mealy yellow pear-type tomato.

Beam's Yellow Pear: Tasty, but not as tasty as Yellow Submarine. Both are thicker at the neck than the common little bland, cute-as-a-bug yellow pear tomato.

Napa Grape:  Juicy for a grape tomato.  Nice flavor.

Jet Setter: Mid-sized, tasty, quite easy to peel without blanching. One was craced at the stem end, the other wasn't

Better Boy: Tasty as usual. A little softer that Jet Setter. I preferred its flavor today.

Moskvich: Picked an under-ripe one with blossom end rot. Ditto Cosmonaut Volkov, from my first plant. The one picked from the fence resembles it in appearance, so it was probably identified correctly.

The 2010 Harvest is Underway

It's cooler than normal for June this year. Harvest is well underway, and will accelerate in the next few weeks. We've had tomatoes, turnips and beans. We've had our first stone fruits. And we're getting lots of squash. Below is a photo of some of our early harvest, along with my current favorite hoe, a little triangular one. I also loved my Dad's little crescent-shaped scuffle-hoe, but I've never seen one like it since.

Pests and Diseases

 We seem to have Tobacco Mosaic Virus in the yard, particularly in F's volunteer tomatillos.  It's spread by touch to all sorts of plants - tomato, pepper, bean, squash, cucumber, melon - just about everything we have planted.  Plus ornamental flowers and weeds related to beets (like lambs quarters) and those in the ubiquitous Amaranth family.  If plants are not infected early, it usually stunts rather than kills them.

Hope we can convince F that smoking around the plants and touching them actually does spread the disease.  Next year, we may need to think of a way to restrict his activities to his own part of the garden without breaking his heart.   Tests show that dipping one's hands in milk before handling plants can reduce the spread of the disease.  Sometimes plants are also sprayed with milk.  I have no clue why this would reduce the spread of an RNA virus.  F. doesn't believe that the disease cannot be cured with a "medicine" or that it is spread by touch.  He does believe that you can kill a horse by stepping on a scorpion, even if you're a football field away from the horse.  It's a challenge to introduce new ideas to him. 

Tobacco Mosaic can be seed-borne, which means that my plans for saving seeds and trying a few hybrids may be scaled back.  It is persistent in plant debris and soil where plant parts are not fully decomposed.

Squash Bugs have a good start now on our squash plants.  They like watermelon plants, too.

First Stone Fruits, 2010

We had a difficult spring for stone fruits this year - lots of rain during blossom time. For the first time, fruit set was sparse on Flavor Delight Aprium. Also on Royalty and Golden Amber apricots, plus my favorite, Harcot. Not much going on with Canadian White Blenheim, either, but this is no surprise, as it needs a late pollinator and is in a marginal zone for winter chill here.

On the other hand, we got a good fruit set on Blenheim apricot, a disease-prone variety. And it is starting to ripen before temperatures reach 100 degrees - unusual around here. No pit burn. It's a great fruit if you're in a climate which is friendly to it.   For example, if you live in Santa Rosa, in what was once called "The Valley of Heart's Delight" based partly on the fruits grown there.  Various apricot varieties can be quite picky about the climates they prefer.  Apricot success here  this year is all about the weather.

Back to the start of the harvest season: Our first fruits were little Royal Rosa apricots. They were better this year than in the past. I think that their water was restricted a little as they ripened. They also need to be dead-ripe before you pick them, or they are bland.

Next came Flavor Delight Apriums - nice fruits - and Royalty (Not Royal), a big, mushy fruit on wind-resistant spurs which David likes because it reminds him of his Grandpa's apricots.

Harcots started soon after Flavor Delight. Not many of them, but they were big and luscious.

Some of them are pictured above with Flavor Delight apriums, a little yellow plumcot (blushing to red) from LE Cooke wholesalers and Arctic Star nectarine. The plumcot is an interesting fruit: soft and tender.  It loses quality when it goes beyond yellow with a little blush. It has a little bit of a delicate floral flavor. At its best, it's sweet, but can also tend toward being insipid. I think of them as resembling a wild fruit. Wild fruits seem to come in two main types - highly flavored and tart or even astringent, or slightly sweet and tending toward the insipid. This fruit is closer to the latter category. Some people really like them a lot. I think they would be good combined with cranberries for a less-assertive sauce.

They tend to ripen over a very short period of time, especially in years hotter than this one. The tree is compact and attractive, with nice leaves and showier blossoms than most plums grown for fruit. It's easy to care for. It blooms late in the plum season here, and it may cross-pollinate Emerald Beaut - a prized variety of plum. It takes a few years to start blooming, and often blooms on main branches.

Arctic Star white nectarine (the reddish fruit in the picture) are one of breeder  Floyd Zaiger's great family of super-sweet fruits. They can be enjoyed firm-ripe or soft and very sweet. The fruits should be thinned more than I thinned them this year, given ample water until they start to ripen, and protected from insects through dormant spraying, garden cleanup, etc. This will help prevent the bitter almond off-flavors and stunted fruits which can occur in white nectarines.

Squash Report, June 2010

Once squash plants start to produce, they tend to keep producing quickly, until they "run out of steam" from producing so much fruit so fast. The colander above features my favorits variety, "Magda", a Lebanese or "Cousa" type light, club-shaped zucchini from France, plus several yellow squashes: Saffron Prolific - a shallow crook-neck, Butterstick - merging from straightneck to yellow zucchini, and Cougar - disease-resistant. Plus the zucchinis Kojac (few spines on plants) and Diplomat - a dark green variety. I don't seem to have any surviving Sweet Zuke, a club-shaped dark green zucchini from Burpee which often breaks when you pick it.

The yellow squash with the green end is from one of F's volunteer plants - looks like a child of Magda and Zephyr, a remarkable summer squash with some winter squash in its breeding. Your chances of getting squash of quality comparable to the parent plants from seeds taken from a mixed planting of summer squash are not good. Especially when you started with F1 hybrids. The F2 generation often produces some oddities. The bicolor squash in the photo, for example, has a larger seed cavity than its probable F1 parents. The doesn't mean you couldn't get something nice from deliberately crossing two open-pollinated varieties to get your own F1 hybrid.

I used most of the squash in this colander, plus some already in the house, to make two big skillets full of variations on this recipe. One included a diced Ancho (Poblano) pepper, ground red pepper and Pepper Jack cheese. The other included bacon and was topped with Colby/Jack cheese. I think I like a medium or sharp cheddar better than Colby/Jack for this recipe, but you can vary ingredients to taste.

Below is the row of squash we planted. Some of F's volunteers (not pictured) are already turning yellow and sickly, and are ready to be removed from the garden. They're scattered in odd places. He also planted winter squashes of unknown parentage. Good hosts for next year's crop of squash bugs. He seems devoted to growing them, though. Gives them to friends in the fall.

We already have big adult squash bugs mating, plus nymphs. They can get out of hand fast. Grateful we don't have squash vine borers or cucumber beetles.

First Tomatoes and Beans, Last Summer Turnips 2010

Well, our first tomato was a little currant tomato, variety "Sweet Pea". Not bad. There were also a couple from a mis-identified "Fourth of July" plant that turned out to be a tiny, crunchy grape tomato - Not outstanding. We had a Stupice tomato ripening, but lost it, along with a few others of the 61-plus plants we planted. Interestingly, all of the plants lost were either purchased rather than started by us, were over-wintered or were planted where a diseased plant came out.

Our second harvest includes a few tiny Sweet Pea and "Fourth of July Mystery" tomatoes, plus one larger (still not very big) real "Fourth of July" tomato.  They're pictured above with the last of the "Summer Turnips", variety - Oasis.  Still good.  Only a hint of the off-flavors which develop in turnips during hot weather.  We've had variable weather this spring, but it's been cooler than normal lately, in the 70s and 80s during the day.

Also pictured, pole beans "Fortex", perhaps the best pole bean in the world, and a heat-tolerant variety, "Champagne".  A bean specialist gave me some seeds to try.  I only planted a few plants, as pole beans are usually marginal on our spring weather.  I typically like them small, but a few got away from me, going to the "beany" stage that David's Mom likes.  There's also a sprig from the "Grenada" pomegranate, with a baby fruit and blossoms.  Not enough tomatoes to provide color.  They needed some help.  We should have a bunch soon.

Honors for Biggest Green Tomato go to "Anna Maria's Heart".  This is a surprise, as it is listed as a late variety.  Healthiest-looking Plant award goes to "Nyagous", a smallish "black" tomato.

Update June 15:    Anna Maria's Heart produced a ripe tomato.  It had been squished against the fence support, and had some bad spots.  This is the first time I've grown oxheart tomatoes.  I think I'm going to like this one.  Sweet and meaty so far.  It's pictured below with what is probably "Sweet Million" plus some more currant and grape tomatoes in the little bowl and "Sweet Quartz" (a Japanese cherry tomato named for the color of Rose Quartz) on top of the beans.

'Champagne' pole bean is out-producing 'Fortex'. Champagne is a flatter bean and has strings - just like old-time string beans with less-elegant names like 'Turkey Craw' or 'Blue Greasy Grit'. I hope to try Fortex again in the fall.

The difference in hue between the "pink" Anna Maria's Heart and Sweet Quartz and the "red" tomatoes in the bowl is not particularly evident in the picture, but the "pink" tomatoes have less yellow pigment in the skin when fully ripe.  The "Sweet Millions" pictured here were sweet and a little on the mealy side.  Hard to judge quality on these first tomatoes.  "Sweet Quartz" was juicier with more complex flavor.  It's large for a cherry tomato.

Below is a row of our tomato plants with the June 15 vegetable harvest.  "Nyagous" is in front, with dark foliage to go with its dark-colored tomatoes.  There are four of these rows, plus extra plants along the dog-run fences.

I was successful at emasculating some blossoms for hybridization, but not at drying and transfering pollen.  I'll probably skip further  hybridization experiments until next year because of the tobacco mosaic virus in the yard.  We will likely lose the "Brandywine OTV and "Haley's Purple Comet" to disease.  I think I can get some fruits from the latter variety first.