Every year I adopt the attitude of "Survival of the Fittest" when it comes to gardening- if you require a lot of my attention, you will die. But this year I decided to try, really try, to take good care of my garden, especially since this has been the worst drought since 1936. Religiously, every two or three days I have been watering every plant in that damn garden and what has it gotten me? Blossom end rot. So I've stopped watering. I haven't been out there for a week. I have re-adopted the "Survival of the Fittest" attitude and when I when I went out to the garden this afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised.
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| The green peppers have some rot, but not many, and most are smaller than usual, but I'll take them. |
I picked most of the onions and they are actually larger than they have been in the past.
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| This picture is really crappy and I'm sorry but I don't know why it looks weird or how to fix it. But I just spent the last hour uploading pictures and I'll be damned if I'm going to do it again. |
The tomatoes, however, are doing much better! I discovered that you can, actually, cut off the rotten end of the tomato, and I have been picking them all week (just a few here and there) and freezing them. But today they really started ripening and not every tomato has a rotten butt!
I split them into rotten and non-rotten groups and it's really not to bad- I didn't count, but it looks like a solid 60/40 rotten to non-rotten ratio. I also noticed that it's mainly the early, smaller tomatoes that are afflicted, so that's good news as the green tomatoes are looking pretty large. I cut off the rotten butts and froze them (the tomato, not the rotten butt) and my plan is to make ketchup next weekend.
I'll just keep not watering them and leave it to nature. We got two inches of rain yesterday, so they should be good for awhile. So this year's tomato crop might not be a total bust!
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