Over the weekend Jay and I took the time to clean up the garden and get things back in order with the season ending for for the lettuce and the tomato plant. The balcony looks much better and much cleaner now that its done.
This is how it’s looking now that all the cleaning has been done:
The Balcony’s current state
It seems like a lot less than it did before, and I’m not sure I am unhappy about it. With the tomato and the lettuce gone there is certainly a lot less to worry about. And that tomato really did cause me some headache!
So, about that fail-tomato. I am quite disappointed that things turned out the way they did. Things were going so well, and then there was an awful heat wave (super hot, tons of humidity, etc., etc.). A couple of days into the aforementioned heat wave I noticed that a few of my new tomatoes had developed the same rot that ended my tomato season early last year. I pulled those off and then everything seemed to be fine. THEN I came home one day and the plant was really wilted and looking poorly. I panicked and watered it more than I normally would, and thinking I was doing a good thing, I did this for another day. For good measure, I guess you could say. And that was the end. I watered it and the water just sat on top of the soil. It stayed there for days. And then the leaves yellowed and it just looked awful.
Fail-Tomato – Before it was pulled.
I kind of resigned myself to the fact that it was done and ignored it for a little bit. This past week Jay finally got sick of looking at it the way it was and pulled off all of the yellowed, dying leaves. It looked marginally better, but I decided we were better off just cutting our losses instead of trying to nurse it along in hopes it recovered. We are taking a different approach next season and growing a different variety from seed. We have done a bit of research and it seems that beefsteak tomatoes are actually a difficult variety to grow. We are going to try a Canadian variety next season and are hoping that it goes better.
This variety from what we can tell is much easier to grow. I have high hopes for next year!