Box Car Willie Tomato Experiment

Last year one of the tomato plants we grew was a Box Car Willie, an indeterminate variety that was expected to produce a heavy crop of 6 to 10 ounce tomatoes.  We got 12.5 pounds of tomatoes from Box Car Willie, but the plant unfortunately developed Fusarium Wilt and had to be taken out.  Fusarium Wilt is caused by a fungus that invades the plants through the roots and eventually kills the plant.

Box Car Willie plants--Control on Left, Graft on Right

So this year Cindy decided to run an experiment by trying to graft a Box Car Willie plant onto some resistant tomato root stock in the hope that the root stock would make the plant better able to fend off the pathogens that cause Fusarium Wilt.  Both the root stock and the tomato plants were started from seed.

Once the plants were about a quarter inch in diameter, she used grafting tape to splice the two plants together and planted the grafted plant in potting soil.  The plan was to raise it in a carefully controlled environment and then plant it and an ungrafted Box Car Willie plant side by side in the same bed.

The plan went awry when we had to leave for a week shortly after the plants were grafted, and we had no idea whether the graft would take while we were gone.  But the grafted plant survived and actually looked pretty healthy when we returned.

In fact, the grafted plant, on the right in these pictures, is now taller and healthier looking than the ungrafted control Box Car Willie plant on the left.

Four Days Later

So far they are both growing very well, putting on several inches of new growth just in the four days that elapsed between these two pictures.

My only reservation about this experiment is that if both these plants survive, we're going to be up to our kneecaps in Box Car Willie tomatoes, in addition to all the tomatoes from all the other varieties of tomato she's planted.

We'll keep you posted about the experiment as it progresses.

Spring Is Here

Nasturtiums

So how do we know in San Diego when Spring is actually here?

Unlike most of the rest of the country, we had a warm, pleasant winter, with temperatures mostly in the 70 degree range, but popping up into the 80s from time to time.

Then, when the Vernal Equinox arrived in the third week of March, our temperatures dropped back into the low 60s and we had clouds and periods of rain.

What???  Now that it's officially Spring, we've had days that are more like what our winter is supposed to be.

Years ago, when Cindy's folks were visiting us, her Mom asked us "How do you know when it's winter here?"

We had to think about it for a minute, and then we mumbled something about having to wear long pants when we play golf and having to close some of the windows at night.

But one of the main indicators of Spring's arrival is the crop of Nasturtiums on the hillside behind us.  I know they're considered an invasive species, but they're pretty, and to me they always mean Spring is here.

A Volunteer... Potato?

Compost Bin With Potatoes

We knew that potatoes like plenty of compost, but we didn't realize that they like it so much they would seek out the compost bin and root there, but we found exactly that the other day.

Mere feet away from these hardy volunteers are the pampered potato plants that Cindy has lavished attention on for months now, carefully starting them, then transplanting the seedlings to the grow bags inside Fortress Blueberry, where she periodically rolls up the sides of the grow bags to add more potting soil so the plant will produce more potatoes.

Those potato plants are currently looking like they are struggling a bit; since they are cool weather plants, it may be getting a bit warm for them now, although that doesn't seem to have bothered the volunteers.

Healthy Looking Volunteers

The Beet Goes On...

Double Beet

When Cindy was harvesting her beets yesterday, she found this very interesting double beet among them.

Makes you wonder how this came about; did one beet form and the plant forget about it and start to form another one?  Or was it just one of those odd vegetable things that happen now and then?

There were plenty of beet greens in this crop of beets, and the Swiss Chard is ready to be harvested, too.

There's always something interesting going on in the garden.  

"Hold This", or The Joys Of Installing Bird Netting

Fort Blueberry

Don't get me wrong, we love birds of all shapes and sizes, except maybe crows, but we love our blueberries even more.

As we've watched the current crop of blueberries ripening, it has become apparent that we need to protect the berries from attack from the air as well as from assault by ground forces in the form of the California Ground Squirrels who will soon emerge from their burrows with their cute but voracious babies, looking for a juicy meal or three.

The California Towhees have been eyeing the blueberry crop as it ripens, so that meant it was time to install the bird netting over the raised bed.

Cindy first slipped some PVC pipe on top of the panel stakes, then cut lengths of black irrigation tubing and slid it into the PVC pipe to form a half hoop from one side of the bed to another.  That created a structure to support the bird netting, but the real trick was getting the dang netting over the bed and clipping it the the upper edges of the protective panels.

That's where I, as the unskilled labor of choice, came in, for "hold this" while we stretched the netting from side to side.  We finally got it all stretched and clipped, although for a while I thought Cindy was going to become a big cocoon of netting as she clipped the last two pieces of it together.

Then she attached strips of mylar to the hoops to warn the birds off.  That worked for about half a day; we later saw a Mourning Dove sitting on top of one of the hoops, ignoring the mylar, but fortunately the dove flew away without becoming entangled in the netting.

And, of course, we just had to pick some of the riper blueberries while we were there.  Yum.