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hazelinok

Radishes, wind, spring fling gifts and it's raining...again?

8 years ago

First, I just came in from the garden and it has started raining again. I forgot to check the rain gauge, but last checked we were at 2 inches since Friday night. Not horrible at all.

The wind is horrible. I fully expected to see leafless plants on my garden tour. They are holding onto their leaves with all their might, but good grief! They are beat up. Especially the peppers.

But, even though beat up, the tomato plants are setting fruit. I'm so proud of them.

I would be concerned about the SF gifted plants, but they come from Oklahoma and are used to this. They are currently sitting on my front porch. I can't wait to go through them. I will be asking many questions regarding their care once I know what I have. :)

Did anyone bring Rue? I think that's what I picked up, but it's not marked, so I'm not sure.

How do you store radishes? Mine usually shrivel in a couple of days. But often I like to eat just two or three on a salad at a time. Do you refrigerate? Clean first? Cut the greens off? I harvested most of mine today.

In other good news, I have peas! They are still little, but I can't wait to taste them.

In bad news, I didn't mark my peas, so I'm not sure which variety is which. I must do better at this. In fact, I can't remember which tomatoes are BrandyBoy and EarlyGirl. I thought I would remember. Maybe once their fruit grows and ripens, it will become obvious.




Comments (5)

  • 8 years ago

    Take pictures! While planting lay your seed packet by the row, and take pictures... then you can sort of tell, what is planted where. :)

    hazelinok thanked OklaMoni
  • 8 years ago

    Moni you are too clever.

  • 8 years ago

    Hazel, We had crazy wind yesterday but no rain. I'm not going to whine about any lack of rainfall because I feel so fortunate to have only a little mud and no flooding. Rain in decent quantities either will find us later on in May or it won't, but the smaller amounts we've gotten here are enough and we certainly don't want a repeat of May 2015 (24" of rain in May, with 12" of it falling in about 4 or 5 hours one Sunday afternoon). I can't believe you got more rain yesterday. When Oklahoma weather goes on a binge, it really goes wild. Poor northeastern OK is going to wash away if this keeps up.

    With radishes, I wash them well, cut off the greens and store them in the vegetable crisper in the fridge. I don't know if this is the best way, but it works for me and they don't shrivel.

    With the peas, it may be hard to tell which is which. Do you remember which varieties you planted?

    With the tomatoes, it will be easy. Brandy Boy will produce large pinkish-red beefsteak tomatoes that are sort of oblate in shape. You'll generally get ripe Brandy Boys about 75-85 days after transplanting the plants into the ground. Early Girl will produce much earlier and her fruit will be smaller, round red globes. While both are indeterminate plants, the Brandy Boy tends to get both taller and fuller. You also can tell them apart by the foliage. Early Girl has regular leaf foliage that looks like normal tomato leaves with more serated leaf edges. Brandy Boy has potato leaf foliage that is more the general shape of potato plant leaves, a characteristic it gets from Brandywine.

    Moni, That's a great tip!

    Dawn


  • 8 years ago

    The rain only lasted a few minutes. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day. When it warms a little, I'll go outside and see what sort of damage was done.

    The pea varieties are Oregon Giant Snow Dwarf (I like how they are giants and dwarfs!) and Sugar Ann. It might be the Oregon ones that are producing right now. I need to think back....

    I'll look at the tomato leaf foliage when I go out in a bit. Maybe I can figure it out. Some of them are setting fruit already...maybe those are the Early Girl.

  • 8 years ago

    If you planted both peas at the same time and they germinated at the same time, if you base your expectations on estimated Days To Maturity, then Sugar Ann should be about two weeks earlier, but there's no guarantees because Oregon Giant Dwarf Snow Peas might like the cooler weather a little better. I do like that they are giants and dwarfs at the same time, which kinda makes me grin because it just sounds wrong. That is part of the magic of gardening---sometimes plant names make no sense. There's an heirloom tomato that illustrates this perfectly (really, there's tons of them). It is called Big White Pink Stripes. So, are you picturing a large white tomato with pink stripes? That seems logical, right? Nope. It is more of what I'd call a medium-sized peach colored fruit both inside and out, with a faint pink blush (sometimes) on the blossom end. Many people never see the white striping, so I guess we can assume the white striping might happen in some climates but not all or perhaps at a certain stage of fruit growth. Who knows. I bet when someone named it Big White Pink Stripes, it was a name that made sense at the time.

    I believe the first dwarf tomato plant I ever grew was called New Big Dwarf, because a big dwarf makes sense too, right? At least the silliness of the names can keep us amused.

    Early GIrl is one of the stragest tomato plants I've ever grown. Don't get me wrong. It produces great. It doesn't run out of steam and stop producing at mid-summer. It just keeps going. But....

    In my garden, Early Girl is rarely early. Almost never. Sometimes plenty of other varieties that have DTMs in the 70s produce ripe fruit before it does. Every now and then, though, it will produce early if not earliest. It makes no sense, and it makes me wonder if there are various strains of EG out there, with some being the true ones that produce early and others having mutated or changed somewhat and producing later. Regardless of whether EG produces early or late, the fruit and taste look the same, and it produces heavily so I grow it. I just know I cannot count on it to be early every year...or sometimes ever. A couple of years ago it was early and the shock almost killed me. This year's earliest ripe fruits have come from the Better Boy I bought in January, which produced ripe fruit by around the third week in March (when it still was inside the house) and SunGolds I grew from seed. The next one to produce ripe fruit will be either the next round of fruit from Better Boy or the fruit on the 4 or 5 Sophie's Choice plants I raised from seed for early fruit this year. Sophie's Choice is a workhorse that produces well and heavily, and it generally is early. All veggie varieties seem to do as they please though, with mid-season and late varieties sometimes freaking you out by producing fruit before the early ones do. Gardening is just weird that way sometimes.

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