Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Summer of the Green Tomatoes

Ah, September! Harvest season, when the garden continues in full swing, and you daily pick its wonders: squash, corn, cucumbers, and those fresh, red ripe tomatoes. But not this year.

This year, after a cold spring, a rainy June, and only two months of summer, we might finally have the dreaded Summer of the Green Tomatoes!!


Our squash plants are doing fine - both zucchini and crookneck. You can't hardly do anything wrong with squash, and if you even turn around and look the other way for about ten minutes, when you return you have More Squash.




But as for red tomatoes this year, that's another story. Our temperature is already in the forties at night, and the sixties during the day. With occasional rain. And tomatoes need sun. We performed emergency surgery yesterday, cutting out the extra green growth, and only leaving a few stems with lots of green tomatoes on them, hoping to force the plant to ripen them.






We can only hope and pray that, just like tough revisions on a manuscript, this hard pruning will produce the desired results. But I have my doubts.


So tell me, did you grow a garden? How did your tomatoes do this year??

9 comments:

Sharon K. Mayhew said...

You've got a lot of green tomatoes! We had so much rain that our stems died...I planted potatoes too. OMGoodness the potato plants looked awesome, but then I went to dig them up and they were rotten. Have you ever smelled rotten potatoes? It was awful...Maybe next summer...

Laura S. said...

What a bummer! I hope those tomatoes turn red for you soon!

Dreaming said...

Your plants look glorious!
We have a garden and it's been tons of fun. We've had lots of squash, beans, peas, carrots and turnips. Our peppers are beginning to ripen.
Sadly, our tomatoes and potatoes are diseased. We think it may be from compost that came from horses who ate grass that had been sprayed with herbicide. Scary.

Linda Benson said...

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

Sharon, rotten potatoes, uck. Good luck with everything else.

Laura - thanks! Think sun!

Dreaming - don't know much about diseased tomatoes and potatoes. Good luck finding out what it is.

Danni said...

Now isn't that funny? I'm getting a ton of tomatoes right now and absolutely zero squash. They're literally refusing to grow. I've got a crookneck out that set all sorts of baby squash about a month ago and - literally - they've stopped growing. They've been about 3-4" in length for the last month. Sigh.
Great raspberry year, very sad blueberry year (a fungus wiped all but a handful of my entire crop out), pretty good shelling pea year, so-so garlic year.... (shall I continue?) - lol. Bottom line: not as great a growing season as last year. And now it's rainy and cold again. We didn't even get 2 full months of summer and this makes me a grumpy girl.

Linda Benson said...

Farmgirl - that's crazy! We had almost no raspberries this year, and usually they are coming out our ears! Our peach tree gave us bushels, though. Now I'm afraid, like you, that barefoot season is over for good this year, and gloomy soup weather has set in for the long haul. Rats!

Cinette said...

I couldn't even get my garden in this year! It was under water for most of May, June, and the first part of July, so I didn't even bother after that. No raspberries either, strawberries were sparse, but for the first time EVER my 10 year old apricot trees produced fruit! Not a common site is Southern Alberta, I must say.

Have you ever tried red plastic mulch? I used it last year and all my tomatoes ripened on the vine, which is also not common for this neck of the woods.

Cinette
http://cinettesmusings.blogspot.com/

Linda Benson said...

Cinette - Hooray for your apricots (my very favorite fruit) I'll try to find red plastic mulch. Sounds like a pretty easy fix to keep the ground warm. Our drastic pruning measure have helped a tad. I did see a little color on some of the tomatoes. If I can just get them to a yellow color, I can pull up the whole plant and let them ripen in the garage. *Sigh* I want me some of them red-ripe tomatoes!

Gone2theDawgs said...

It was a strange summer...we have loads of green tomatoes, lots of raspberries, our normally prolific peach tree...nothing has ripened. Lots of blooms on my squash plants...sigh.