Congratulations! I don't know about your recent history, but we've lost plums to frost the last few years. We are looking forward to being right behind you on the harvest. Mom's trees are loaded. Thanks for the reminder that good things are on their way. Enjoy!

Seedmama, As best as I can recall, we had a monster peach and plum harvest in 2005 and then a moderate one in 2006. In 2007, 2008 amd 2009 the trees bloomed too early and we lost all the crop to a late frost or, actually, to several late frosts. Since we moved here in 1999, we've averaged a great crop once every three years, so three years in a row with no crop, or not much of one, was very hard to bear.

I threatened the plum and peach trees this year by telling them I was going to cut them down if they didn't produce this year. They're all loaded with fruit, although I doubt my threats influenced them at all.

Great stuff is coming to y'all any day now because at our house, the harvest is running at full throttle. Just this week, we've harvested snap peas, lettuce, tomatoes (from the containers and from in-ground plants too), 1 onion (the wind broke its neck), new potatoes, green beans, crookneck squash, strawberries, blackberries and plums, and several herbs. I am exhausted and it is only Tuesday! So, if my harvest is exploding right now...y'all should be in the same boat in a couple of weeks.

I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the native dewberries just outside my garden fence because they kept disappearing and I thought a wild animal was getting them. Today Tim confessed he's been eating them while working outside. lol How many have I had? Exactly 1 berry. Tomorrow I think I'll eat the strawberries while picking them and then he'll wonder where all the berries are going, but I'll know where they went!

Dawn

I go give my plums a little squeeze every day and they are still small and hard. I can't wait!

Dawn, what variety of tomato that is in-ground are you now harvesting from? Thanks.

Oh, so cool! I can't wait for our own fruit trees to start putting out in a couple of years. We did pick our first cherries last week, though. Two of the new-this-year cherry trees each put out three cherries. LOL Yum!!

Diane

Boomer,

With oodles of varieties (I think I have 60 or 70 this year, I've completely lost track), I don't necessarily pay attention to the names when I'm picking them, and I have about 25 or 30 varieties new to me this year, so I don't recognize them all by sight yet. So far and this is from memory because I don't take notes, the ripe ones have been from Better Bush, Mr. Bruno, SunGold, Better Boy, Ildi, Sweet Million and a couple of others whose names I don't remember but think it likely JetStar was one of them. From the container plants, Better Boy, Better Bush and Husky Red Cherry are producing heavily and I've been getting ripe ones from them every day or two since the last week of April. The next in-ground tomatoes to ripen likely will be from Brandy Boy, Fargo, JD's Special C-Tex or Black Brandywine. My tomato plants are all over the place this year, with mid-season and late-season plants already with large, ripening fruit just as early as the early tomato plant varieties. I haven't found DTMs to be especially reliable here. Early Girl, for example, is never, ever early for me, but it does produce all summer long and is one of the last to stop producing in the fall.

Some years, the tomatoes are fairly predicatable in their ripening patterns, but this year they are very erratic. I have to wonder if the early heat has caused them to ripen more quickly than normal....not that I am complaining.

Y'all hang on, ripe fruit is coming soon! Diane, cherries on brand-new trees are great and a sign of good things to come in future years, don't you think?

I have to harvest more strawberries and sugar snap peas today and harvested the first round of broccoli this morning--Small Miracle and Packman are mature simultaneously and Major, new to me this year, is not quite ready but should be in a few more days. I don't think it is going to be a great broccoli year....too hot too early. Last year was great, and I never have two great broccoli years in a row, so I guess I'm not surprised.

I'm hoping and praying I get all the broccoli and peas harvest complete within the next 4 or 5 days, and then can tear out the plants and plant the follow-on crops of okra, pole beans and black-eyed peas in the areas they currently occupy. If that works out, I would get all that done before the major fruit harvest begins. Unless a sudden hail storm or crazy insect damage or hungry animals hit our trees suddenly, we'll be harvesting huge numbers of peaches and plums....hundreds and hundreds of each. I love a good fruit year and it makes up for the bad ones, but then there is a lot of fruit to deal with in a limited time.

We have enjoyed the Sugar Snap peas so very, very much this year, but I have to tell you that I am sick to death of picking them and I'm ready to move on to something else.
lol
Dawn

Well...we've been picking strawberries along the last couple of weeks, and today I plucked up my very first few mature leaves of lettuce!
Thankfully, my bush beans had not yet bloomed when the infamous hail hit, but they've bloomed and have about 2-inch beans on them, all in this week's time.
Everything else is growing and happy...it took this week for my tomatoes and pole beans and cucumbers to kind of step back, regroup and start in growing again...I'm quite proud of them for surviving the golfballs!
The only thing I sort of wonder about are my potatoes. If I'm not mistaken, they were just starting to form bud clusters when the hail hit. Those were all completely knocked off, as were a small amount of branches. I'm afraid I won't be able to tell when they're ready because they're sort of sad looking anyway. I tried to kind of dig down in the mulch with my fingers and was worried about digging something up too early...what do you guys think? Dawn, you said you were harvesting new potatoes...that would give me a couple of more weeks, wouldn't it, unless it just gets scorching?

Thoughts??

Sharon

Sharon,

It is good to hear your garden bounced back so well from that terrible hail storm. Sometimes I'm amazed by how resilient plants can be.

I wouldn't worry about the parts of the potato plant that were knocked off and doubt it will hurt your yield much if any. Are you saying you rely upon the flower clusters to tell you that your plants were setting tubers? That's just a myth....an old wives tale, with no offense intended towards wives of any age.

Your potatoes will be ready whenever they're ready...some varieties are mature in 90 days, and others in 120 days or even longer, but you can harvest and eat them at any time once they've reached a usable size. They'll indicate their readiness/maturity by dying (the green stalks and leaves start yellowing). Then you can dig them whenever you're ready after that. I often clip off the vines at the ground level once they're yellowing, and then just dig whenever it is convenient for me--but usually within about 5 days after I've clipped off the vine. Leaving them in the ground like that for a brief period of time allows the skins to toughen up a little so they're not as prone to damage when they're dug.

I expect my 'early' potato varieties will be ready to harvest in mid-June and the late ones might not be ready for another month after that.

I have a wide range of potato varieties--9 or 10 or 11 types, I think, and I've only harvested new potatoes from one of them, and that was because I wanted new potatoes to cook with the first batch of fresh green beans. The new potatoes ranged in size from marble-sized to hen egg-sized.

At this point, as long as the potatoes are healthy and the foliage isn't showing any signs of disease, all you need to do is keep them evenly moist....if they are in a cycle that swings from too dry to too wet, you'll get knobby potatoes. They're still edible, but just not awfully attractive if that happens.

Dawn

Sharon,

I'm right there with you on the flowering potato theory. In fact earlier today I dug out the instruction sheet that came with my Ronniger's Potato Farm order in hopes of figuring out what to watch for to begin digging. Even their literature states the blossoms indicate the new potatoes may be ready.

I've read elsewhere that the blossoms indicate the tubers are just starting to form... then I've also read to wait until the foliage yellows and dies back before digging.

So I guess somewhere after blossom and before total collapse would be a good time to dig....? lol This gardening stuff is not really an exact science is it?

Lynn

Y'all,

There is no direct link between tuber initiation in potato plants and flowering. Each of those two is a separate process that is not directly linked to the other. Normally, tuber initiation will occur from 5 to 7 weeks after the potato plants sprout. In many potato varieties, flowers appear after tuber initiation has already ended or as it is just ending, but the tubers will initiate even if the potato plant never flowers. Once initiation ends, that is followed by tuber enlargement which I think does tend to occur as flowering occurs but that's a coincidence too.

In his book, THE VEGETABLE BOOK, Dr. Sam Cotner says this about the relationship between tuber initiation and flowering of the potato plant: "Contrary to popular belief, there is no correlation between flowering and tuber initiation or development. Cooler temperatures are conducive to both occurrences and during cooler periods, Texas-grown potato plants may flower profusely, but tubers will be formed regardless of whether or not flowering occurs." At the time he wrote the book, which has been my 'vegetable growing bible' for well over 20 years, Dr. Cotner was the head of horticulture at Texas A&M University and also had been an avid home gardener at that time for over 30 years. For me the biggest surprise in his statement is not that he says tuber initiation isn't linked to flowering but that he says flowering may or may not occur. I thought flowering always occurred, but after thinking about it for a while, I can remember times when either flowering didn't occur, or I didn't notice it occurred.

For what it is worth, the new potatoes I harvested this week to cook with the first batch of green beans were from a Russet potato plant that had not yet flowered at all. (It has been several days, and it still hasn't flowered.) Since I harvested potatoes up to the size of hen eggs, this plant clearly has already had tuber initiation and some degree of tuber enlargement even though it hasn't flowered at all.

It was Dr. Cotner's book, by the way, that taught me that a lot of what I thought I knew about growing veggies was not correct. I've always grown a lot of veggies dating back to my childhood, but it wasn't until I read his book and applied what he said to my own gardening efforts that I saw the yields on all my veggies greatly increase and felt like the space devoted to vegetable gardening really paid off.

I looked at my own potato plants today and about 2/3s of the varieties have flowered already or are just beginning to flower. Oddly, the largest plants---the ones grown in the stock tank---haven't flowered at all even though those plants are 2 to 3 times as large as the in-ground potato plants.

I have put a 12" thick layer of alfalfa hay on my in-ground potato bed this week in an effort to keep the ground cooler because unseasonably warm temperatures do have an adverse effect on tuber enlargement. It is ironic that my potato plants look as good as they've ever looked, or even better than they've ever looked in past years but the yield may be reduced because the weather got too hot too soon.

Dawn