It's crazy-hot here, and so humid the air feels like walking through linen curtains. You breathe by slurping. And yet there has been no rain! As I type this, we are receiving our first steady, modest downpour in weeks and weeks, even though for all that time the air has felt saturated enough that you should be able to wring water out of it with your hands, like a washcloth. This is not ideal for a container garden, which requires even more active watering than the normal kind of garden.
And yet, my very own thirsty container garden, if I may say so, is kicking mondo ass. Back at the beginning of June, you might recall, the basil was yellow, the mint looked like I had run it through a pasta maker, and the tomato plants only had little yellow flowers on them. But look at the tomatoes now! Behold them.
These are beefsteaks; they are not quite softball-sized, but they are plenty big enough for me. This cluster is the lowest branch on the vine, with right-of-first-refusal on all the water and nutrients moving up from the soil. Earlier this week I harvested one for the first time this year, a big smooth round sucker from this same cluster. It is finishing ripening on the counter as I type this. By the time this blog goes onto the website I may have already gone Sandwich Mode with it.
The beefsteak plant is going crazy with tomatoes. Here are some more, from farther along the vine:
These, you will agree, are what they call "beauts." There are two more clusters of tomatoes on the vine, smaller and newer ones not mature enough to decide for themselves whether to be photographed and exposed to the internet.
Here is the other tomato plant, which is growing "Better Boy" tomatoes.
This plant is not quite as vigorous as the beefsteak; as I mentioned in the previous episode of Garden Check, it took longer to produce its first flowers and they appeared farther along the vine than I'd like. But still! These are nice 'maters, man. And there are lots of them.
I feel ever so slightly dirty about the prodigious bounty and vigor of my tomato plants at this precise moment. A couple of weeks ago, it was time to fertilize the soil under my tomato plants—in fact, it was past time, and some of the newer baby tomatoes looked like shit because of it—and I discovered that I was out of the nice organic tomato fertilizer I bought way back in April. Due to severe acute brokeness, I could not hope to buy more of it. So instead I turned to the ancient tub of sinister blue crystallized Miracle-Gro that has been gathering dust at my house possibly since before we even moved here. The fact of the matter is, this evil chemical shit has worked very well on my tomatoes, even if I might go to Gardener Hell for using it. I console myself that at least I am not putting this stuff into the actual ground.
Not the point! The tomatoes are thriving!
Here's that basil plant, which, again, was yellow and sad-looking back in the first week of June:
Have you ever seen anything lovelier than this in your whole damn life??? No!!!
I'd depleted the soil by watering it too heavily, or anyway this is the verdict supported by events: that I'd been washing nutrients right out of the bottom of the pot in my fear that the vulnerable young plant would otherwise overheat. Once I added some compost and, uh, bone meal to the mix, and scaled back my deranged watering to two modest drinks a day—one in the morning, and then one at the peak of the afternoon heat, as much to cool off the roots as for hydration purposes—rather than one gigantic one, this baby took off. I snip the top cluster of leaves off of one or two branches every morning and make a little two-egg French omelet with basil in it. Later, once the tomatoes are cranking out ripe fruit regularly, I will go Caprese Mode. And then at the end of the season, the great Pesto Bloodbath.
Here is the mint, which previously looked like I'd been chucking lit firecrackers at it:
On the far right you can even see the busted, shitty old stalks that were in June's photograph, slouching in the background. The mint's problem, you'll recall, was that I took a little too long to discover that this blue pot drains very poorly, and as a consequence this plant's roots were drowning. Drilling a big drainage hole in the bottom of the pot took care of that; after a couple weeks of simply hanging in there, the mint really took off. I should have known it would. Mint is indestructible.
And here is the, ah, still rather shabby and pathetic-looking Italian parsley:
I'll confess: I still am not 100-percent sure what's going on with the parsley (which was having the same drainage problem as the mint back in June). Like, clearly it is alive, and that's good, but also look at how little it is, and at those unsightly brown tips. The various websites and books, helpfully, say that this can be because of too much watering, or because of too little watering, or because of too much fertilizer, or because of not enough fertilizer. Thanks a lot!
What I'm trying right now, as of yesterday, is sort of the opposite of what I do with the basil, which does not ever like for its soil to be dry or hot. Parsley, I am told by authoritative-seeming knowers, does not like steady dampness, but rather prefers a nice deep drink with time to dry out in between. So I am gonna try that. I'm getting a little impatient with this damn parsley! I want to feel confident that I can harvest a couple of leaves on the majority of evenings, to chop up and sprinkle over this or that dinner preparation. This parsley plant very plainly is not ready for that. It'd be out of leaves within a week.
This has been Garden Check. Share updates on your own gardening ventures down in the comments.
