Gardening

Today is an important day - as of 4 PM, the text of my upcoming tomato book is complete (meaning a first draft - still have a few appendices to finish)....I am printing it for my wife to review and critique (it hurts, it hurts!)....and in parallel, my daughter is making suggestions and edits as well. But all is on track for me to push the big (currently 92K word, 210 page) Word doc off to my editor at Storey on June 30. Photography is scheduled for mid-late July (fingers crossed the 25 tomatoes I am featuring are all ripe)....publish date isn't until Dec 2014, so lots of time for tooing and froing, edits, refinement, etc....

Ah, the garden. By crop:

Lettuce is done (sobbing about that one - it went from stunning to bolted in just a few weeks)....that area is now planted with bush beans, squash and cukes.

Big garden tomatoes are looking good - just fed, all nicely staked and tied, all healthy.

Driveway tomatoes:

edge big pot indeterminates are looking quite good, with a few trouble spots (an obvious crossed plant here, a slightly diseased one there).

small pot extreme prune indeterminates were getting too tall and heavy and topple over with every strong wind - so they were relocated to either our deck or front yard boxwood tree area. All look good except a few.

Dwarf tomatoes in grow bags look quite good; most have fruit set, a few have foliage issues. If you grow enough tomato plants, you are guaranteed to lose some to disease, so I've gotten over the annual realization of that fact.

peppers look wonderful, as do eggplant - in fact, there are small fruit coming on each.

So all in all, if I were a teacher, the garden in its current state gets an A-. Which is damn fine when compared to other seasons; the adequate rain and temps staying in the 80s are helping to keep disease somewhat at bay, and encourage good fruit set.

As always, I wonder how I did this when I worked! retirement...highly recommended (well, at least retirement from the corporate world - the garden writing thing is just at the start!)