FIRST TOMATOES!

Here they are! The Beam's Yellow Pear from Seed Savers Exchange is the first to produce ripe tomatoes in my garden this year. This plant is the most vigorous of the 10 I am growing this year so I'm not surprised that it has the first fruit. I can't report on the taste as my wife took these to work with her lunch today. They come 65 days after setting out and 108 days after starting the seeds. I'll compare with the packages later

The Black from Tula and the Pineapple look like they will have ripe fruit shortly. The grape has a few that will ripen this week. I expect to have a lot a tomatoes next week and then it will be a deluge!

Bug ID

Another creature from my vacation. On Tuesday morning around 10am we started to notice these bugs flying around the backyard. We didn't see any on Monday. by noon there were several hundred, maybe a thousand of them flying all over the place. It took a while to catch one even though they were not fast. They very rarely landed. This one is average and is just one inch long. The bottom was the most reflective I've ever seen. Sort of like looking at a green mirror. They reminded me of June bugs. On Wednesday there were maybe half of what we saw on Tuesday. On Thursday there was maybe 50 . On Friday I saw 2. Very strange. ID?

Moth ID

Last week I was in Tennessee on vacation. While walking down a sidewalk at the Bass Pro Hhop in Sevierville I almost stepped on this moth. My wife pointed it out to me. This thing was very large...maybe 3 inches across. What is it?

Jumping Worms update

I watered my flower beds this morning and after 5 minutes I started to look around, expecting to see the thousands of 'jumping worms'. While I did see several there was no where near as many as last week. Maybe whatever it is in the mulch that they like is just about gone. I'm liking that...

Here are previous posts regarding the beasties...
http://gardener-matt.blogspot.com/2007/07/more-with-jumping-worms.html
This one has the tentative identification as a type of maggot

here is the original...
http://gardener-matt.blogspot.com/2007/06/jumping-worms.html

Site of new butterfly garden

Here is the site of my next project...a butterfly garden. I'm just finishing the wall by filling in with topsoil. I'm not going to start planting until the end of July. Have to finish a few other things before then.

The plan all along was to fill in this area with flowers. Making those flowers butterfly friendly just gives me some extra focus as to what plants I want. The picture doesn't give any idea as to the size of the area. The wall is 6 feet from the garage. the total length of this bed is about 100 feet, but the butterfly garden will be only 50-70 feet, depending on how ambitious I get. More to follow.

Beam's Yellow Pear

Beams' Yellow Pear from Seed Savers Exchange. This is, without a doubt, the most vigorous plant of my 10 tomatoes. It's pushing 6 feet tall and has hundreds of fruit throughout the plant. For some reason I have 2 of them. One was intended for my mom but something got mixed up. There are at least a dozen fruit clusters just like this one on each plant. I don't know what I'll do with all the fruit, but that is a good problem to have!

I have two other plants I cannot ID. I believe one is a Big Rainbow, or maybe a Brandywine...or maybe an Amana Orange...or maybe. I'll have to keep better records next year. What happened was I started a few extras with the intention of giving them to my mom. She informed me she only wanted a couple of plants so I ended up with a couple extra. I didn't write down what varieties I planted and ended up with a couple of unknowns...Oh well...they are doing fine. It looks like I am on my way to a great tomato crop this year.

Happy Fourth of July!

Big Rainbow

Big Rainbow is one of my favorites. This year they seem to be a little on the small size. The one on the left is a bit bigger than a baseball. I know this plant will produce some big ones throughout the year. I seem to think the plant is just starting to take off now.