Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Food & Drink / Food Chain How's your garden handling nature's wrath?
Posted by Mike Sula on 06.23.09 at 11:55 AM
Every year around this time I lie awake wondering which plague is going to afflict the thin strips of reclaimed weed fill and the laboriously hauled buckets of rooftop dirt I call my garden. Wind and the pernicious curse of squirrels are usually my biggest foes. This year, rats have gnawed their way into my supposedly rodent-proof city-approved and distributed composter.
And then this morning WBEZ reports that 2009 might be the Chicago area's wettest year on record, with rainfall almost ten inches above average. This didn't ease my growing fears about the unceasing cloud cover preventing my tomatoes and chiles from fruiting, to say nothing of the repeated biblical deluges that have already drowned my kale. So this morning I was happy to see this pretty baby dangling from my Stupice Czech tomato plant. That's typically an early variety, but four other heirlooms up there have fruited also, which felt great until I spied the swarms of sickly white aphids clustered all over the stalks.
In any event, I'm curious what gardening readers are contending with this season. How grows it in these End Times?
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Stunted tomato plants, basil that hasn't grown taller than about four inches. The greens are pretty happy though. And the corn'll be knee high by the Fourth of July, just like it's supposed to be.
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I saw my first baby tomato today too! It's about the size of a blueberry at the moment, but I have high hopes for it. I can only do container gardening on my back deck area (which has a roof covering it, so at least my plants haven't drowned). My basil's grown more in the past four days than in the couple months since I planted it, and the mint's been doing okay all along but is growing much faster now. I've never grown tomatoes or peppers before so I don't know if they're stunted, but they look pretty healthy.
So, every time it rains, I get 200+ gallons of water in my rain barrels...which I then have to drain before it rains again, or water overflows right next to foundation. Looking forward to a few dry days. Still...have bountiful strawberries and many excellent pea pods exploding forth every day. Tomatoes and tomatillos look promising and seem happy to have dry feet for the first time in a long time.
i don't think my mentuccia's gonna make it. the heirloom black cherry tomato seems to be thriving now, though.
