Yesterday, I went outside to check on the spring garden. At this point, the reason for checking on the spring garden is because of the 5 tomato plants, 4 of them have tomatoes on them. Of course, the Krim only has 1 tomato, but still, it counts. In any case, since I figured at this point in time that any current flowers were not going to be able to ripen into tomatoes so I might as well pull off all the flowers on all the plants (including the pepper and eggplant).
Since the Brandywine Tomato didn't have any tomatoes, I went ahead and pulled it out. There are a couple of growths on the root (I have pictures, but I'm outside babysitting the cat to make sure she doesn't eat any plants so I don't have access to the pictures I took), which I'm pretty sure means something was wrong with the plant. The Krim has one tomato on it, the BHN and Viva Italia both have about 5 and the Roma is so loaded with tomatoes it's starting to fall over and take the tomato cage with it. This is the plant I'm most worried about with the upcoming freezes. With the soft freezes I can just put a sheet over it to give it some protection, but once a hard freeze is projected then I'll either have to make green tomato chutney (using Lancashire Rose's recipe) or I'll have to do what we did in Colorado--that is pull the whole plant out and then hang it upside down somewhere in the house and wait for the tomatoes to ripen. Of course, doing it that way, you only get the tomatoes that were close to turning pink to ripen, the ones that are itty bitty on the plant and are no where close to even beginning to turn pink usually are thrown away.
The Eggplant has about 10 golf ball sized or slightly bigger eggplants on it. It was during the inspection of the eggplant that I found out that I had an infestation of nymph leaf footed bugs. I immediately sprayed the plant with soapy water and then I came back out about 2 hours later and smashed up all the bugs I could find. This morning when i went back out, I didn't see a single nymph. The eggplants I can pull off whenever to use, but I think I'll let them grow until the first frost so they can get bigger.
The Corno di Toro pepper finally has some peppers on it--one is pretty big, and the others...not so much. I hope the big one can ripen before a hard freeze kills the plant.
The Thai pepper plant is in much the same situation as last year--that is there are about 5 peppers on it that are green, and they probably won't turn red before I have to pull the peppers off of the plant.
The butternut vine is keeping on, keeping on. It has one butternut squash on it, and the squash is already bigger than the one I pulled off in the summer--apparently squash plants do not like the head of summer. Also keeping my fingers crossed that the squash will ripen before a freeze.
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