Garden Update

This photo is of about half all our tomato plants (with one mystery vine laying on top)--all lush green with thousands of little flowers and very few tomotoes. I am standing, holding my phone at eye level so these must be 8' tall. This is the back corner of our yard, where the garage meets up with the back wall.  We had our compost pile there for years and, obviously, the soil there is top notch.  Even though I put all the seedlings (which I started all by myself from overpriced envelopes of heirloom seeds) in raised beds, these out performed the other raised beds by 10-fold.  So the lesson to learn is that I need to put tiny compost tubs* into each sad raised bed (the tubs are wending their way from Amazon as I write this) and also put all compost we generate during the winter directly into those same beds.  And if I do that for 10 or so years, the entire back yard will be filled with 8' tomato plants with no tomatoes on them.

*The tiny compost tubs hold a gallon and are shaped like tiny green garbage cans--except that the entire bottom few inches has loads of holes for worms to access the compost. The best feature is a lid that snaps on tight to keep out ground hogs. About a month ago I tried to do this cheaply by using empty 1 gallon plastic flower pots that I have by the hundreds as they have drainage holes in the bottom. I also thought, being black, if I have them only halfway submerged, the sun will hot them up and the compost will break down faster.  But of course I didn't have any lids--no problem, I thought, that means the rain will get in and I won't have to mess around with popping lids and watering.  Well, a few hours later, during the night, our resident ground hog not only ate ALL the compost, he ripped the pots to pieces and tossed the bits all over the yard.  So he loved the compost but containers enraged him. I went online and of course there are a million options products. The ones I got were the least expensive for the quantity, had lids that really snapped on tight (or so it seemed on the little video I saw), and were much thicker plastic than the cheap pots you get with plants at nurseries. They were supposed to arrive this morning but are now scheduled to show up later this afternoon. 

Amateur YouTube gardeners are divided right now: some are ripping out tired, used up plants and happily putting out "fall seeds" to get beets, spinach and kale.  Others are heading indoors and letting the summer failures rot down to be dug into the soil next April.  I am torn, mainly because I really hate kale.