Here’s the latest. It’s a 48″ x 48″ x 56″ plant house. I had been shopping for either a tall cold frame or a small greenhouse. This one is right in between those two things. It cost ~$60 which is about as much as I wanted to spend on an experiment. The Amazon reviews are pretty ok, though it really is strung up tight. Note the support poles that are bending from the strain. Maybe the plastic will loosen over time.
It snugly holds three EarthBoxes. In theory a 4th could be squeezed in along the back if the the other three boxes were pulled all the way to the front of the house. There’s no bottom to the unit, so it just drops right over the boxes.
(L-R) Pak Choy, very small romaine, and spinach.
Hopefully we’ll get some fresh greens over the next couple of months. At the very least it should allow for some earlier planting in the spring.
I harvested all of the remaining peppers after work tonight. It came to eighteen pounds — fourteen pounds of sweet peppers and four pounds of hot peppers. The six sweet pepper plants had a box to themselves this year. The three hot peppers were less than half as productive — they wound up sharing a box with the lemongrass and shiso, each of which got monstrous. To make it even tougher, they were planted on the shadier end of that box. The hot peppers and bell pepper would have done a ton better in their own box, or with short, less “sun demanding” stuff. (The bell pepper was shaded by the lemon cucumber, we got one bell pepper out of that plant.) Live and learn. I’ve been saying that a lot this year.
Did you know earwigs will eat holes into Jalapenos? Who knew? Jalapenos of all things…
Today’s pepper harvest. The hot peppers are in the sheet tray. The six sweet peppers are arranged as they were in the box, with the best sun hitting the right side, then the bottom row in the late afternoons:
Left column, bottom to top – Gypsy, Tequila, Banana (yellow, was trapped under the shiso), Anaheim.
Center column – Gourmet, Lipstick (an apt name), Jalapeno
A day late on the update this week. Yesterday was a triple-header of sports: Seahawks (on tv), Mariners (in person), and Sounders (raining hard in person). I’m still recovering.
This week the weather was cold, windy, and rainy. One day it rained as hard as I’ve ever seen it rain in Seattle. It was blowing sideways and running like waterfalls off of the roof. The temperature dropped down into the 40’s on a couple of nights. The peppers and tomatillos seemed ok with all of that. The tomatoes are finished for the year except for the Sun Gold plant. I believe we’re up over 200 pounds of stuff to date, so no complaints here.
On Friday I pulled all of the semi-ripe Roma tomatoes:
Today I pulled the rest of the tomatoes and almost all of the cucumbers. The cucumber plant is about toast (pic down lower in the post):
The basil has not been digging the cold and wet. I cut about 97% of it, leaving just a little bit to see how it does over the next couple of weeks. The seven plants provided 2-1/2 pounds of leaves on Wednesday and Thursday. At the QFC on Thursday they had .66 oz packages for $2.79. At that rate the 2-1/2 pounds represents $169. Crazy.
Wednesday at the card table:
Thursday:
I have no idea where the “Gretchen’s” bag came from. I’ve never heard of it. I’m guessing a visitor left it behind.
Thursdays proto pesto. It was divided up into sandwich freezer bags and frozen:
Success with basil is initially what showed us that the Earthboxes rock. I’d always killed it in the past, before the Earthboxes. It’s why we purchased ten more Earthboxes when we got the room. (That, and the only good place to plant anything at the house happens to be on a concrete slab in the back yard.) This year we planted four basil plants as early as we could, then four more mid-season. They were totally unfussy and almost care-free all year. The total yield was about 7 pounds of leaves. At the prices above ($4.22/oz), that comes to $472. Even at something like $1/oz, it’d still be over $100.
21 pounds of produce today, a new single-day record. That brings us up over 180 pounds for the season, including 65 pounds of cucumbers and 70 pounds of tomatoes.
The wind was picking up as I was taking this picture and preparing to bring everything inside. It’s now raining really hard. It looks like I got outside (and back in the house) just in time today.
The Roma tomatoes seem to have hit their “timer”. Here’s a picture “before” the big pile above:
It feels to me like fall is coming, and the plants agree. The lemon cucumbers will need to be pulled soon. The regular cucumbers aren’t far behind. More and more fruits are dropping off of the plants, especially when the hard rains come, so today we pulled all of the tomatoes that looked like they were at least 95% of the way there — I’m not sure that some of the varieties are intended to be uniformly red all the way to the stem, anyway.
(All pictures taken during a heavy rain.)
Today’s harvest. The Brandywines in the back right average about 5″ in diameter and 1-1/4 pounds each. It’s basically six tomatoes weighing 8 pounds total:
At the start of the year the cucumbers were straight, dark green, and relatively round on each end. Then we started seeing more twisty ones with bulbous ends, and straight ones with tapered stem ends. Now they’re coming in much lighter in color and misshapen. The first little one to rot on the vine happened this week. Note the two different colors here, and the moldy leaves — I’m guessing this is how the cucumbers tell you they’re about done:
The tomatillos got pruned earlier in the week. Yesterday the tomatoes and cucumbers received the same treatment. I also trained the cucumber vines towards the “front” — the whole box has been leaning “back”:
I decided that the tomatillos were due for a pruning on Tuesday. There were a lot of yellow leaves in the understory, and a lot of unripe fruit was just dropping off of the yellow vines. I figured pruning off everything that looked sick would leave more sun for the healthy plants, including the tomatoes in the adjacent box. Anything that was yellow was targeted. So I pruned and pulled and pruned and pruned and was left with one healthy plant, and one stump. The weaker of the two plants had basically completely crapped out, but I didn’t realize it until I physically stuck my head into the plants and started cutting.
There’s now a hole in the place of the dying plant.
I also pruned out all of the little runners and new blooms. I don’t think that there’s time for anything totally new to make it all the way to fruition. It really cleaned up the mess, and both the remaining tomatillo and the tomatoes should benefit.
On the bright side, I found another five pounds of tomatillos that had been hiding within the vines.
Sitting on 8 pounds of cucumbers.
I had no idea that many tomatillos were in there. It was “Here’s one. And here’s one. Here’s another…”
In retrospect though, it makes sense. The two plants were purchased at basically the same size, but the surviving plant started growing way faster, and the weaker plant started growing, then needed more support because it wouldn’t stand up under it’s own weight. The imbalance was compounded by the fact that the stronger plant was in position to get much more sun, since the weaker one was sandwiched between the strong one, the lemon cucumbers, and the tomatoes.
One winter project is going to be figuring out a layout for next year that maximizes sunlight for everything involved. Live and learn.
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Late edit: Today takes it to 112 pounds of stuff for the year!
Wow! It’s September already! The tomatoes and peppers are still in full swing. The cucumbers and basil are hanging in there. Everything else is at varying stages of calling it a year.
An overview from the deck. (Clockwise from bottom left: cucumbers, peppers, basil, (top row) brussels sprouts, lemon cucumbers, tomatillos, three boxes of tomatoes. In the center it’s marigolds and bunch onions.) That light colored blob on the top right is a Brandywine tomato:
The raspberries are now established. Hopefully that’ll be some no-work goodness next year:
FlatbreadGarden 