A Last Hoorah
Cuttings: A Garden of their own.
I intend to gift these but now I don’t know if I can let them go.
Tomatillo and Tomato in the Sunlight.
Is there anything more enchanting than a backlit leaf?
Looks like a booty.
I mean it even has a back and hips, cmon. It’s a booty.
It’s becoming apparent that fall is steadily approaching.
The plants have begun to react to the change in weather and sunlight, and are trying to bolt or wither as best they can - though I’m actively working to postpone that as long as is possible.
Part of this fervent need for postponement is because several of our fruiting plants are still in the process of fruiting. Many have loads of fruit on the plant, though slim to none have ripened. We’ve tried a number of tactics to try and push them forward so we get at least a single yield from each plant, but ultimately they do what they wanna do.
For example, our tomato plants are fucking massive. They’ve dwarfed the other plants in the area (save for the hops) and have outgrown their trellises. However, each cluster of fruits on these plants remains stiff and greenish yellow. At least their leaves are fragrant, in an excessively tomato-y way.
Our tomatillos, on the other hand, are doing just fine. It took them a moment to get going, though now are producing two to three harvestable fruits a week. Similarly, the other lantern plant, the ground cherry tomato, has been consistently dropping little lantern-cased tomatoes since about a week after being interred. Both plants clearly prefer growing outward rather than up like their standard tomato counterparts. The dill and fennel growing near them have been completely engulfed.
One plant we’re baffled by are the bell peppers.
These produced in abundance extremely fast, once the weather turned truly hot. They demand a lot of water, but use it efficiently. The only problem is, these are supposedly meant to turn yellow, and then red. Many seemingly mature fruits have been left to sit on the plant for weeks, and don’t appear to be growing or changing color. They taste good, though! We’re seeing a similar issue with the adjacent jalapeños.
And then, we come to the hops. This plant, as you may imagine from past posts, is getting on just fine. We have to train it daily to go back onto the trellis it’s latched on to, rather than creeping forth to a nearby tree branch (which it could easily do in a single day).
The baby hops are coming along nicely, though they appear a bit drier than is expected. Still, almost each node above six feet of vine has a pair of hops, and gosh darn they’re cute as hell. We’re already plotting how best to cook ‘em up and drink their booze juices. That’s not weird, right?
Related-ish: A spider has taken up residence between a hop vine and the larger of the two tomato plants. We think it has an apartment just under one of the hop leaves, as there’s an abundance of extra webbing there, as well as some previous kills it hasn’t yet eaten. So that’s neat. I didn’t know spiders had a hunting net and a sleeping net. Kinda cute. Kinda.
