AAArrgggghhhh!!

So remember how last time I posted about my garden I was so excited about how big the tomato plants had grown and how well the garden was doing? Well, I wish it were then again. We had a rainstorm that was short, but dropped a huge amount of rain in a very short time that nearly pulverized my plants.

They are nearly half the size of what they were after I pruned out all the broken branches, some of which contained some promising hopes of some fantastic tomatoes.

This is a pile of all the branches I ended up cutting off the tomato plants. Some weren’t broken but were bent so much that it didn’t make any sense to keep them. I am hoping that the pruned plants will produce tomatoes more quickly as there will be less leaves to concentrate on growing and the focus can return to the actual tomato fruit.

Before and after. It is too depressing.

It just made me so sad to have to go through and cut out all of those potential food making branches, especially when I could see the flowering buds on them getting ready to sprout the tomatoes. This one looks probably the worst of them all. I left the one big center stalk as it was not damaged, but was bowed down by the weight with no support from the other branches that held it up previously, because it had tomatoes on the end.

The corn did really well this time though. Still sticking straight up. I guess because there was no wind, only torrential downpour. There’s still time though. We will see what the next few weeks bring. On the plus side, I am gaining huge knowledge about how to plant my garden in the future. Items on my to do list include:

1. Increasing the amount of space needed for the cucumbers (they are slowly trying to strangle the tomatoes next to them), the tomatoes, and the corn.

2. Hopefully get a fence up that will protect the corn from the damaging winds.

3. Get bigger, sturdier frames for the tomatoes (I did not realize they would be giant tomato plants).

4. Still plan on one zucchini plant put on one of the ends of the garden in order that it might grow its giant umbrella leaves up and over the fence out into the yard instead of taking over nearly everything in its path.

5. Ditto with the squash. I have had to push it over the back of the raised beds several times and cut the tentacles from the tomato plants to keep it from growing up and over them.

Oh well, live and learn. If I get anything from this garden I will consider it to be a success. Even if I don’t I will have learned better for next year. My main problem was thinking these plants would grow the same way here as they did in California, which was hardly at all considering the dirt was more like clay and rocks. That’s what I get for having super soil. Maybe it can help revive the poor things.