August Archives - The Gardening Adventure

August 2020 harvest

August 2020 was not as good as August of last year. This month harvest was around 65% of the one from last year.

The biggest drop are eggplants with 51 lbs and tomato with 45 lbs less then the same month last year. Half on my eggplants are planted in pots this year and the quality of the potting mix wasn’t good, that is the main reason for lower harvest.

The lower quantity of tomatoes was in part because this year I planted less tomato plants but also because some of the plants didn’t have any fruits on them. I harvested most of the tomatoes from the second generation tomato plants that I have in pots.

The top 3 producers, which make up for 81% of the entire harvest for the month (the same as the last month just in different order), are:

Figs
Tomatoes
Eggplants

This was the year of figs, I harvested year to date, 1964 figs weighting 181 lbs.

Garden Journal – August 2020 part 2

The first papaya tree looks worse with each passing day. I picked up the fruits as they started to change color, but the taste is not that good, so we made compote. We boiled them with water and a little bit of sugar and it came out quite good, similar to pumpkin flavor. There are a few pictures below showing the difference between the 2 papaya trees.

This month I harvested the seeds from the two large sunflowers. These are my first sunflowers since I started gardening in the Los Angeles area. As a teenager I had my share of sunflower harvest as my grandparents grew thousands of sunflowers to make oil from the seeds.

Some of the tomato plants died and I removed them. As a result I have only 2 plants left in one of my tomato garden bed.

The peppers and eggplant seedlings were ready to be transplanted. They are volunteers which sprouted from the compost that I used for my tomato plants in containers.

I removed the celery from one of the rectangle containers to make space for the seedlings. Then I tried to purchase some manure to amend the potting mix, but chicken manure is nowhere to be found at any store. I’ve been told at Lowe’s that they haven’t had any in the past few months. Armstrong Garden had only steer manure, but one of the workers told me that it has a lot of salt in it, so I went home empty handed.

Searching in my storage, I found a bag of Osmocote. I didn’t use Osmocote in a few years, but with the shortage in manure, I decided to use this bag.

This month I started planting seeds for the winter season. I have cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce and artichoke seeds so far. I hope that the artichoke seeds will sprout, but I’m not 100% sure since they are about 6 years old.

I started preparing the eggshells that I’ve collected for the past few months and I will grind them at a later time. There are quite a lot of them and it will take me a few hours to make the powder.

Garden journal – August 2020 part 1

This month I removed 2 of my best producing tomato plants of the season: the red cherry tomato and the 2nd year beefsteak tomato plant. I harvested 779 cherry tomatoes weighting 20.5 lbs and 161 beefsteak tomatoes weighting 46.5 lbs.

We had a few heat waves and I was afraid I will lose the 10 feet tall cherry tomato plant due to the heat, so I ended up watering it too much. I think I accidentally drowned it.

I cut the beefsteak tomato almost all the way down and left just a little bit in case it will decide to give new growth for a 3rd year.

The seeds from the radish plants that I pulled out in second part of July were ready to be removed from the pods.

The dragon fruit started having a lot of flowers recently and I pollinated about 30 flowers in 3 days. This year I started collecting the pollen in a small container and used it to pollinate other flowers. I store it in the freezer between pollination sessions for the next wave of dragon fruit flowers. This technique was suggested by the local gardening group and it improved my success rate immensely. I have been using the same pollination technique for the cherimoya trees for the past few years.

The flowers open only during the night time and stay open just for a few hours. They must be hand pollinated during the night time, between 10 PM and 12 AM.

I moved the pots with 2nd generation of cucumbers from the temporary location next to the avocado tree and dragon fruit because they were getting too big.

We were lucky to have a lot fruit from our fig trees this year. I have been drying them using our dehydrator and I also made another round of jam. This time I mixed the figs with small peaches from our tree and this is by far, one of the most amazing jams I’ve made!

I harvested more peppers (Gogosari) than we could eat and made some pickled peppers, one of my favorites, so we can eat them during the off season. I also saved seeds from the peppers for the next year.

Garden update August 26 2020

We had a few more heat waves in the month of August and the first papaya tree is now dying. The papaya fruits are drying and starting to get soft on the tree. The second tree is doing fine, it didn’t have that many fruits initially, and I think that made the tree stronger.

Another papaya plant sprouted from compost in the place where I had the cherry tomato. I will leave it there until I decide what to plant next. I’m thinking of planting another cherry tomato as an experiment for winter harvest since this is a spot facing south and it gets a lot of sun.

I get most of my tomatoes these days from the second generation of tomato plants that I have in containers. I’m really glad I tried this! Normally I only plant one round of tomatoes, but this year, with the pandemic, I decided to start another generation of tomatoes from seeds in April. This definitely extended our tomato season and I plan to continue doing this every year. Our star tomato has been Golden jubilee, which produces large tomatoes, very flavorful and juicy.

I removed half of the old tomato plants from one of the tomato beds as they unfortunately lost the battle with spider mites. Only Better boy and the cherry tomato from the first generation are still producing fruits.

The eggplants from containers are full of spider mites because we had very hot temperatures and I didn’t have time to treat them with a solution of neem oil and soap. Even though they are not looking well, they are still producing. Eggplants are very resilient.

The 1st generation of cucumbers that I planted in containers are starting to do better after I removed the last year’s tomato plant. I’m not sure about the exact reason why, but I finally got a few decent size Chinese cucumbers from them. I also moved the pots with the 2nd generation cucumbers next to the avocado tree, as I want them to have more space to grow and a some shade.

My plans of moving one of the 3rd generation tomato plants in the place where I had the big cherry tomato had to be delayed, because I noticed that the tomato had spider mites and I’m currently trying to get rid of them first and make sure it’s healthy.

The bush beans are doing much better, but I didn’t harvest too many beans since they also started getting spider mites very early.

The artichoke plants died, but I can see new growth coming out. I’m definitely looking forward to that as we love artichokes in our house!

This year, the dragon fruits are doing much better. My hand pollination is getting much better and the rate of success seems to be around 75-80%. A big improvement from last year when it was 0% 🙂

I left the strawberry runners reach the soil to develop roots and multiply. I plan to move them afterwards into new pots, in about a month or two.

Citrus trees have a lot of fruit.

There are just a few figs left on the trees. I noticed another fig tree that had only 2 fruits and now is starting to make a lot more figs. Hopefully they will have time to ripen before it gets cold.

The persimmons are starting to change the color. We can all barely wait!!! Last year we had only 4 Fuyu persimmons due to an unfortunate heat wave that affected the tree 2 years ago in the beginning of the season. We’re very happy to see it healthy and producing again.

I harvested all the grapes this month and the leaves are starting to dry out.