Gard Report 2

I wasn't able to play softball with my friend's team as planned tonight after unexpectedly having my eyeballs dilated this afternoon, so I did a couple things out here. On the third tomato plant from the bottom on the left side of this picture, look how it's just about up to the fourth rope on the lattice tonight. In the picture from this morning (last picture in next post), it was just about up to the third rope. Wicked.


These peas have been a minor issue since last weekend. I came home last Sunday after a huge rainstorm dumped a ton of water in Brooklyn and found these plants knocked pretty flat (this was before I staked the yellow tomato plant, and it too was lying on its side). They'd bounced back a little ways but were still lying pretty low. As you can see by this "before" picture.


So I found this length of thin moulding in the basement and cut it into eight sticks, about 10" tall. After completing my first Neighbor Borrow and scoring a ball of string, I tied the sticks together near their tops. I pulled the plants apart from one another and looped each plant over the string to get them off the ground.


Last thing: I pruned the yellow tomato a little bit and then worked the upside-down cage up and off of it as carefully as possible. It was harder to get it back over the plant with the smaller end down but I don't think I did much damage.

The decision to re-install the cage was a toughie. When I first realized I did it wrong (after checking out on Sunday how my Dad did his), I figured I'd fix it as soon as I got home. When I saw how much tomato plant had grown around the upside-down cage, I thought it might be better not to manhandle the plant since tomatoes could probably grow just fine on an upside-down cage, right?

When I looked at it again today I thought I'd go ahead with the fix since the garden is starting to look pretty awesome and there's no reason to have a big metal mistake sitting in the middle of it for everyone who looks at my garden in person or in pictures for the rest of the summer to see.

It wouldn't kill me to be a little more comfortable being a beginner.

And then it occurred to me that it might be cool to leave the mistake there, a conversation piece commemorating a rookie mistake and giving the garden some extra character.

Since I've pruned off the suckers and stems that have grown recently from near the bottom of the plant, though, it's growing much more at the top. The larger diameter rings at the top of the cage will do a much better job of supporting the heavy growth at the top than the smaller rings could. The shape of the cage matches the shape of the plant now. And having the prongs in the ground (per the original design of the cage) should make it more stable than when it was just standing on its head.