June Archives - The Gardening Adventure

How to root cherry tomato suckers

At the end of May, while pruning my cherry tomato plants, I decided to root a few suckers.

I took 3 red cherry and 2 black cherry suckers and placed them in bottles with water. I separated them in 2 bottles, so I can easily identify them later, and placed them in a dark place in my storage shed.

One week later the suckers had roots already.

Two weeks after I placed the suckers in the bottle, they were ready to transplant in pots. Since we had a heat wave recently and the temperature in the shed got over 100 degrees, some of the leaves were affected by the heat. They were starting to show signs of getting burn. That is when I decided to transplant and move them outside.

A week later the heat damage was more obvious and one of the black cherry sucker didn’t survive as it can be seen in the picture below on the left side.

A month after I started the experiment, the suckers were ready to be transplanted in bigger pots. Since is so late in the season, the only ones that I had available were 5 gallon pots. This will be my 3rd generation of tomatoes of this year.

The 1st generation, which was transplanted in the ground at the end of February, are now starting to ripe.

The 2nd generation, transplanted in pots at the end of May, are setting fruits and the updates can be seen here.

Rooted cherry tomato suckers ready to be transplanted

June 2020 harvest

This is the first month that I compare with the last year harvest. June 2020 was my first full month of logging my harvest in the database program that I built for my gardening adventure.

The harvest is only 35% of what I had one year ago in June, mostly because the months of March and April were colder than usual and that delayed most of the plants. The biggest difference were the tomatoes, only 18% of last year’s harvest. The weather is not the only factor in the lower quantities of tomatoes, this year I have 19 plants and last year I had around 30 plants.

Not everything is worst than last year in the harvest department. This month I had around 12.5 lbs of figs which is much better than 3 fig fruits a year ago.

This month I harvested my first ever papaya fruit and is was absolutely delicious.

I harvested the last citrus fruits of this season: meyer lemon and mandarins.

The tomatoes are starting to ripe as it can be seen in the pictures below.

Cherokee purple, yellow Brandywine and better boy tomatoes

This month I harvested garlic and onion for the first time. I planted them with the intent to help other plants with pest control, but it was a nice surprise to see them mature and be ready to harvest.

I was waiting for the figs to ripe for a few month now, they were finally ready and we enjoyed them a lot.

Garden update June 29 2020

Both papaya trees are producing fruits and there are some signs of starting ripening on some fruits.

The cherry tomato plant reached 10 ft, 2 more ft to get at the top of the tomato cage.

I finally harvested my first summer squash after I hand pollinated it. No signs of zucchini yet and probably won’t have any from this plant.

The cucumbers plants are taking over my pepper and eggplants bed.

Some tomato plants are taller than the support system that I have for them.

The peepers are starting to ripe also. The first to ripe were the yellow peppers from last year’s plants. The pepper plants from last season were a success , they produced a lot of peppers.

Below are the pictures with the plants that I grow in containers.

Below are some plants that I let go to seed to collect for the next season and also attract pollinators to the garden.

I have a volunteer cherry tomato that is taking over the parsley container.

Last year's tomato plant — Last year’s tomato plant

I currently have 3 figs that have fruits on them, two trees are on the second harvest for this year.

The guava tree is in bloom.

The grapes are starting to ripe, they will be ready to harvest next month.

Drying figs and herbs

This month I decided to try drying whole figs in the sun for the first time, since my dehydrator doesn’t have enough space for the fruits to be dried whole. I’m not happy with the results, because they started getting bad before they were fully dried, so I don’t think I’ll use this method again. I will continue drying figs cut up in pieces in the dehydrator I did before.

The basil and chocolate mint that I had in pots were getting too big and I cut some it so I can dry it. After I washed them, I put them in trays and placed them in a darker place in the house. I also dried some oregano.

Garden journal – June 2020 part 2

I continued removing yellow and brown tomatoes leaves in the second half of the month of June.

It was also the time to harvest more parsnip plants. The leaves grew too big and the tomatoes plants next to them didn’t have enough air flow.

I transplanted the last eggplants seedlings also. They were long overdue but I finally created some space after removing celery plants.

I harvested onions for the first time and I started the curing process as it can be seen in the picture below.

Since the cucumbers that I transplanted in pots are not doing well, I decided to plant some more and this time my potting mix is 90% home made compost. Part of the reason why they are not doing well is because I didn’t have the right ingredients for the potting mix and I had to improvise earlier this year. This time, I filled the pots with 90% compost and on top of it I used thin layer of potting mix to plant the seeds.

Garden journal – June 2020 part 1

The heat is helping the plants grow nicely so far. I had quite a few things that kept me busy in the first half of the month.

The tomato leaves were getting some yellow and brown spots on them. It’s probably early blight, so I removed the affected leaves. I didn’t have this problem in the past few years. I’m trying not to spray the plants with anything unless it’s absolutely necessary, even if I only use organic treatments. My kids like to eat vegetables directly from the garden and they don’t know how to wash them yet.

Yellow and brown spots on the tomato plant’s leaves

The arugula plant was keeping too much shade to the other plants, so I removed it, even if the seeds were not all ready to be harvested. I collected some seeds and I left the other ones on the plant. When they will be dried and ready, I will pick the rest.

This year I have a lot of celery and I need the space for other plants. I gave a lot to my neighbors and friends and I also chopped some and freeze it for later use.

Another project was to build a trellis structure for the peppers and eggplants bed as shown in the pictures below. The last year’s tomato plant that is right next to this bed, was growing too tall for her support structure, so I used a part of the newly built trellis for the tomato also.

In the tomato pots where I used homemade compost, a few squash plants have sprouted. I don’t know what type they are, but I will hopefully find out in a few months. I removed them and planted the squash plants next to my papaya trees.

Next I was ready to remove the extra growth from the base of a fig tree when I had a surprise. On one of the tiny branches I noticed a few figs, the branch was only about 10″ long.

The last project was to transplant milkweed plants that I received from a neighbor. Hopefully we will have a few monarch butterflies next year. My wife has been meaning to grow this plant for the kids to observe the butterfly metamorphosis. They helped plant the seedlings and they’re also in charge of watering them.

My first papaya trees

Today I will share with you the story of my first papaya trees.

I’ve been trying to grow papaya for a few years from seeds. I planted the seeds in containers and I had a few seedlings, but they died over the winter months. After I lost papaya seedlings two consecutive years, I stopped trying to grow them.

First papaya trees

I gave up on growing papaya, but it seems that papaya didn’t give up on me. In the fall of 2018, a month after I removed a tomato plant, I noticed that something was sprouting in its place. There were 8 or 9 seedlings of papaya! It’s like after all these years they were telling me: “We don’t like the pots, this is the place where we want to grow” 🙂 I amended the soil for the tomato plant using my own compost and these papayas must have sprouted from there.

I was excited, but didn’t get my expectations too high. The winter was coming and from my last experiences, the chances of survival were small.

First winter

The first winter I let all the plants grow in hopes that they will keep each other warm with the extra leaves. As a result, the trees survived their first winter.

Below are the plants on February 26 2019. I don’t remember exactly when I removed the extra plants, in the picture I have four plants.

The next step was to study more about growing papaya. One of the main things about growing papaya is that you need one male tree to pollinate the female trees. I also found out that some papaya trees are hermaphrodite and have female and male flowers. Since they grew up from my compost from the fruits that I purchased from the store, it was impossible for me to know what type they were before they had flowers.

I decided to leave 4 plants to grow until they had flowers, hoping that some will have male and others female flowers. Below is a picture with the plants on June 7, 2019.

Papaya trees on June 7 — Papaya trees – 8 months old

The trees started flowering in August 2019 and all the flowers looked the same. So, I removed 2 of the plants because it was getting crowded and the recommendations are to keep at least 5 to 7 feet between trees. I was ready to break that rule, but with no more that 2 trees.

Below is a picture with the remaining 2 trees, on August 7 2019.

Papaya trees on August 7 — Papaya trees – 10 months old

On September 30th I noticed my first papaya fruit, as it can be seen in the picture below.

Papaya trees on September 30 — Papaya trees – 1 year old

Second winter

Now that I had fruits it was much more important than the first winter that I don’t lose the trees to cold. Since we had near freezing temperatures on 2 occasions this winter, I built a structure and covered the papaya trees.

In November 2019 I started writing this blog and papaya became the star of my garden update posts. Every monthly update starts with an updated picture of my 2 papayas.

I harvested the first 2 fruits a few days ago, June 2020. They weigh 2.2 lbs.

Now it’s the beginning of summer and the trees seem to be continuously flowering and they also have a lot of fruits. It’s very exciting to see how well they’ve been growing and how many fruits they keep producing, especially given that they started as our surprise baby plants.

Garden update June 1 2020

The papaya fruits are almost ready to harvest. I can barely wait to taste it, I’m curious if it’s going to taste much different from the ones purchased from the store.

I just built an addition to the cage for my cherry tomato, from 6 ft to 12ft. The plant is currently about 9 ft tall. I’m looking forward to see how tall it will grow!

Zucchini and summer squash are setting female and male flowers, but they don’t get pollinated and unfortunately I haven’t had the time to do it by hand. So, no fruits yet.

Eggplants, peppers and tomatoes are growing nicely. Soon, I will harvest some eggplants.

Below are some of the vegetables that I grow in containers.

Here are a lettuce and a celery plant that are going to seeds. I left them bolt to be able to harvest the seeds later, but also to attract pollinators in the garden with their flowers.

I removed last year’s eggplants and transplanted 2 tomato seedlings into my rectangle containers.

The last year’s tomato plant is about 8 ft tall and 12 ft wide. She’s doing really well and producing large tomatoes. It’s quite surprising since I didn’t amend the soil in that area at all and originally it was a volunteer plant.

A few weeks ago I purchased and transplanted into pots two blueberry plants.

Yay! The figs are finally starting to ripe, it feels like I’ve been waiting forever for them … or as long as the quarantine. Three of the 5 varieties are ready to harvest. The other two should be around mid August.