What Did You Pick Today? 2014

[Smart Red]

She has beautiful eyes! Tell her I love her braids and gloves. Actually I love all of her style in general. She still looks clean cut but with her own stamp of style!

Ok, I guess I'm happy that she got that hugh zuchinni!

Mary

Thank you, @ninnymary! She has her grandmother's eyes when grandmother is not squinting into the sun. Dad has them, too, with eyelashes most girls would give their eye teeth to possess.

She does have a style all her own. School hasn't seen braids like that since the movie "10" came out. This weekend I realized (once again) how old I was when everyone had a blank look and no one had heard of the movie.

She certainly has her own style and is one who will wear what she likes regardless of what the other girls are wearing. She is usually in a dress or skirt outfit -- ranging from hippie, to Bohemian, to fashionable -- more to the fashionable since she received a car load of clothes from an older cousin.

Not too many people her age (11) would volunteer every weekend to work at the local Farmers' Market, but she hasn't missed a Saturday yet. A free spirit who is different in the nicest ways, we're really proud of our young lady.

 

[baymule]

@Smart Red she is a treasure of the rarest kind.

 

[secuono]

The non-white and different shaped ones are different, from the backyard vines. Idk what they are. Got the original mix of gourds/pumpkins years ago, dogs eat them, seeds come out, they grow. Then dogs eat the new ones, seeds come out and repeat!
I don't go to auctions, these will probably be fed to the dogs and the pigs...if the pigs ever decide to eat anything else besides hog pellets! ugh...

 

[ducks4you]

Still harvesting okra, and I'm going out today to harvest as many tomatoes as my meager pickings have produced. I'll let you know how this ends.

 

[digitS']

I'm still picking tomatoes that have dodged the frosts, been covered in ice from sprinklers, survived flea beetle attacks, the summer windstorms . . .

Really, some of the cherries and the paste plants look pretty good. They just kicked into production because they were put out so late. I think that may have saved them from the wind damage - they were flat against the ground, probably trying to scoop soil over their heads ... they are survivors!

The other tomatoes are a disaster area. I know, I've complained to all of you enuf! The wind & its aftermath came along at just the right time to practically destroy them and it was very disappointing so don't feel alone @ducks4you .

Steve

 

[thistlebloom]

I picked the tomatoes, vines and all and tossed them in the chicken pen. There were still lots and lots of tomatoes there, and probably many were good. But I want to be done and get everything cleaned up for next year.
I noticed that too @digitS, that the tomatoes that were laying right on the ground were fairly unscathed. I guess if I don't get around to staking again next year I can use that as a reason. They are a lot more protected that way. Just darn hard to pick. But the vines had also set roots along the stems on the ground, so that's another good thing.

 

[ninnymary]

Commericially tomatoes are grown on the ground. I don't know why we stake ours?

Mary

 

[thistlebloom]

Commericially tomatoes are grown on the ground. I don't know why we stake ours?

Mary

Commercial outfits probably grow on plastic mulch (but I don't know).
Also they are a lot easier to pick and they stay cleaner when they're staked. Probably less prone to disease when staked, especially in a humid climate when you want as much air circulation as possible.

 

[digitS']

I'll agree with you, Thistle'.

However, my tomatoes have more problems with sunscald when the plants are staked. The nicest fruit is where it gets the most shade.

This was a big reason there were so many throwaways this year. The wind came from the southwest, the plants were blown off to the northeast and never able to right themselves. Maybe I should have gotten in there and did more than try to straighten the few in cages and remove branches that broke. The caged plants fared the worst. Anyway, the fruit was really exposed to the sun and these weren't staked so, sometimes, the weather really works against us ...

A nice bath after all of that wind might have helped. Maybe not insecticial soap but pyrethrum or spinosad to kill the pests that swarmed them. Just allowing them to recover didn't work. They needed triage and I didn't have the skill so, about 20% okay fruit out of all those older plants. Much better in the plants that I didn't want to throw away in June and put elsewhere.

Steve

 

[bobm]

Commercial outfits probably grow on plastic mulch (but I don't know).
Also they are a lot easier to pick and they stay cleaner when they're staked. Probably less prone to disease when staiked, especially in a humid climate when you want as much air circulation as possible.

In Cal., most tomatoes are grown in hundreds of acre fields. They are the low bush, ground hugging, all ripen at the same time with long fruit with thick skins , mostly flesh types ( for shipping) in long rows ( NO mulch whatsoever ) for row irrigation and machine harvesting where the entire plant together with the fruit is conveyor belted to where they have a crew of about 25 workers on the harvester sorting the fruit as it slowly rolls along for evenness of ripe red color, splits, green or partially ripe tomatoes . The fully ripe ones go into a bin mounted on a flat bed pulled with a tractor next to the harvester, the rest of the plants together with the rejected fruits drop onto the ground from the harvester's back end. Then 2 bins are placed on flat bed trucks and immediately trucked to canneries to be washed then processed into (55 gal. drums , or into cans of various sizes ) tomatoe paste , catchup or other processed products, then shipped all over the world. Most of the 55 gal. drums are shipped to Japan to be processed for their and other Asian countries' use. Our then next door neighbor owned a fleet of a couple dozen trucks that shipped the tomatoe bins 24 hours per day to canneries starting in S. Cal. then going northward to N. Cal. as the crops ripened.