More Black Krims, and More Watering!

We have really been enjoying the Black Krim tomatoes. It may be my new favorite tomato. The Brandywines are coming on strong. I think they are determined to remind me why they are the current favorite. Here is a good picture to show the Blak Krim's unique look:

Here is a bowl of Black Krim slices next to a bowl of a sliced up Early Girl. Notice the drastic difference in color.

The vegetable garden is looking good again because we have been watering it day and night:

Unfortunately, now that the garden plants are greener and healthier than the surrounding plants, the deer are visiting!

I guess that's what gardening is - solving one problem after another. Why do we do it to ourselves? Oh yeah, its to get to see the beauty and eat the bounty!

More Drought and Heat Wave!

With no rain and temperatures above 100 degrees all week, it is surprising that the perennial and annual flowers are still doing well.

It is NOT surprising however, that the vegetable garden looks pretty stressed. I just can't keep it watered enough. When the plants were young, I successfully used drip jugs next to each plant but I can't use them anymore now that the summer season veggies are so big.

How are other gardeners doing in the watering department? Do you water daily, use soaker hoses, drip irrigation or some other method? Maybe you don't have the drought problem at all. I know our friends in England has had the opposite problem of late.

Anyway, what follows are some painful pictures of the stress that most of my plants are in. These will not win me any "gardener of the year" awards, that for sure.

A new problem that I am having that I don't remember from years past is that tomato branches are splitting or buckling under their own weight. I assume this is due to lack of water inside the branch. Here's one I noticed as I was watering:

Here's my daughter surveying the stress in the vegetable garden:

Not everything is doing poorly. I don't mean for this to be a depressing post so I will end it on a good note. After all of the watering was done last night (I watered again this morning), I ate a late supper consisting of a Brandywine BLT and some fresh Bread & Butter pickles!

After I ate, my daughters and I made some more pickles with cucumbers we had just picked. Here is a picture of the sliced Brandywine, along with those cucumbers:

And since I've already put too many pictures on this post and since I have begun to ramble, I will post one last proud picture of my first heirloom Brandwine tomato!

Gina from My Skinny Garden wrote a great post about tomatoes being the most photographed of all vegetables. She pondered if we have reached our quota on tomato posts. She is right that we garden bloggers are crazy about our tomato photos. They are like pictures of our children and grand children. So just like you do with kid pictures, look at the blogger's tomato pictures and politely say "Oh wow, how nice."

I just hope it rains soon so I have more tomato photos to show!

Quick and Easy Watering Tip

We finally have gotten some rain here, so there is no longer an eminent danger of the garden plants dying. There still hasn't been enough rain for them to flourish so I will continue using the new watering technique that we came up with during this drought.

We used gallon milk or water jugs as slow drippers next to each plant. Here's how you do it:

Collect some jugs and rinse them out. Then poke eight or ten small holes in one side as low as possible. Use a straight pin instead of a nail so the holes will be very small. I've heard of people making the holes in the bottom of the jug, but I put them on the side down by the bottom. If you put the holes on the actual bottom, you have to make larger holes or they will be clogged by the soil.

Once your jug is ready, fill it with water and put the cap back on about half way. You can regulate how fast the water drips out by how tight you put the cap on. If you want it to drain quickly, leave the cap off.

I use this technique next to larger plants like tomatoes or peppers. In the above picture, the milk jug is watering a cinnamon basil plant. If you want to use dripping jugs between rows, you can poke holes in two opposite sides to water a part of each row at the same time. I like to keep the holes only on one side though, to control the water flow better.

The more jugs you have the better with this type of watering. Each morning, my wife or I take the hose out to the garden and fill up all of the jugs. We move them around to plants that were not watered the day before. Obviously, if you have a large garden, you can't water every plant this way, but since you fill up the jugs with your garden hose, you can then spray the other plants directly.

This slow drip method works better than directly spraying with a hose or sprinkler though. Since the water leaks out slowly, it is a more deep watering. The whole gallon of water makes it to the plant roots and no water is wasted.

If you are having a drought like we are here in Kentucky give the jug method a try!

Rain dances don't help, but Murphy can!

We are all familiar with Murphy's law. According to Wikipedia, Murphy's law states "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." Many times that is true, but when I think of Murphy's Law I think of it more as "whatever you expect to happen, the opposite is what will actually happen." Case in point is the fact that it hasn't rained here for a couple of weeks even though the weather forecast has been "slight chance of showers or thunderstorms" every single day. For the past week I have been counting on that rain to rescue my wilting garden

Finally, I decided that it wasn't really going to rain. Last night I watered the garden as best I could with my hose, AND put blacktop patch down on my driveway. So, since the instructions say that you don't want it to rain for 24 hours after you apply the blacktop patch and since I ran the water hose for almost 2 hours, Murphy paid me a visit! You guessed it, it stormed all night.

Not only did Murphy catch me by surprise, he messed up my plans for today's post. I had planned on complaining about the lack of rain and voicing my worry that I might lose some of the plants since I can't water them all adequately. These were the pictures from last night that I planned to show you:

Pretty awful isn't it? Well, even though I'm kidding about Murphy's law, I'm very glad it rained. It stormed almost all night long. It rained way more on the garden than I could ever water with the hose. Thank you God! I didn't go up to the garden this morning, but I took this picture on my back deck that shows the rain evidence.

Doesn't it look wonderful! Oh, and the blacktop patch still looks okay too.

The moral of the story is that Murphy's Law always prevails, but sometimes you can fool him into doing something good!