First 2011 Tomatoes by Variety

Experience has taught us to bring our tomatoes inside to ripen on the counter, picking them just as soon as they show any color. Anything left on the vine too long will be destroyed by birds and squirrels and bugs.

Philo & I shared two 'Black Cherry' tomatoes last week - guess they were the first little tomatoes of 2011. Here's what's on the counter right now, minus what we'll count as the first regular tomato- the larger 'Early Girl' at bottom in the photo was sliced for breakfast. (Click to enlarge the photo)

We've already lost a couple of green tomatoes to bird pecks - once punctured they tend to rot. That very green 'German Johnson' at upper right in the photo fell off the vine. We had a couple of 'Gypsy' peppers this weekend. A few weeks ago we had great hopes for the 'Mariachi' pepper, but it suddenly collapsed, much like the heirloom tomatoes 'Paul Robeson' and 'Green Zebra' did last year. This is a worry - and one reason the heirloom 'German Johnson' is in a large container instead of in the garden soil.
A couple of mystery squashes are developing small fruit - who will get them first? The squash vine borers, the critters, or us?

Edit Monday AM: Good thing some tomatoes were inside - something (probably a squirrel) attacked one of the few 'Black Krim' tomatoes this AM while it was still solid green -it's in the compost now. And another pepper plant collapsed.

Mystery Melon Melo-Drama

At a garden blogger get-together toward the end of March, Laura of Some Like It Hot brought a few melon seedlings to share, unnamed second generation starts of seeds saved from melons she grew in 2009. Lancashire Rose & I each took one .... did anyone else try to grow them? Thanks again for sharing, Laura!

Our vegetable patch is too small for a melon to sprawl so after repotting it into a recycled cardboard container I stuffed the box into a corner of the compost bin. That seedling grew fast, making enormous leaves and tendrils.
By mid-June it had produced a few melon-like objects, but instead of growing - they just did this I'm not sure if it failed because the melon flower hadn't been pollinated or if insects made holes that set off rot.
A few weeks later the chance of getting fruit looked pretty good

One melon was looking fabulous for quite awhile - although it didn't look like any melon I knew. But while it was still green and hard, something attacked the bottom, the stem was chewed, and the weight of the melon had pulled against the wire, damaging the stem even more. I took the melon inside and weighed it, wondering what kind it would have been. At six pounds it was much larger than the store-bought Tuscan melon - but the interior hadn't matured - looks like Melon #1 was a fail.

A couple of small melons were still on the plant.

After Katina tweeted that critters had chopped her crop I ran out to find Melon fail #2

We took the evidence over to the patio table and cut it to see if we could guess what kind it was - but there was no real color and no scent.
Maybe the remaining melon would grow if I netted it and supported the stem with an S hook

During July the netted plant kept growing and by the 26th some reticulation was showing - was it a cantaloupe like the one grown by RockRose?

Our Melon #3 almost delivered a sweet ending to our tale, but last weekend I found it on the ground, mesh & stem chewed through and skin chomped. The poor fruit bled orange, but not the burnt orange of a University of Texas fan - just the pale orange of a melon taken too soon.
It wasn't fully developed but it sure looked like it would have been a cantaloupe.

Apparently in my garden protective mesh can't be plastic - it would have to be steel! Back in Illinois in the 1990's famed gardener Trudi Temple told us that in order to get any fruits or vegetables for the table she had to build a wire-roofed-and-sided-enclosure with more mesh buried under the ground to prevent animals from digging from underneath.

Sometimes I daydream about having a small version of that enclosure here.

It's Still Autumn in Austin

Even though the Brugmansia went from still-in-bloom last Thursday afternoon

To crisped and frostbitten by Monday afternoon

Even though the Blue Butterfly Flower Clerodendrum is also crispy brown today

Even though the Loquat is no longer blooming and the hoped-for fruit may have been hit with cold and we'll have another year of no loquat fruit
Even though we're now using the big comforter instead of the light blankets, and the berries on the Burford Holly are a wintery-Christmasy red .

Even though the cannas that backed up the Julia Child rose are no longer green as in this photo from last Thursday

...it still feels like autumn to me.
After all, that Julia Child rose is still blooming and holding onto her foliage (in answer to Jean, the bloom is good, but she does get blackspot and has fewer leaves than she should)

After all, the temperatures are in the sixties and the leaves are falling and swirling around the patio, needing to be swept so we can use the barbecue,

After all, it took a long time to rake and sweep this pile, go over it with the mulching mower and empty the bag over and over into the wire leaf enclosure

After all, there seems to be an endless supply of unfallen leaves that will need raking - even if the projected cold front arrives
After all, the pomegranate tree is still glowing golden in the Secret Garden

After all, the pink rose near the Brugmansia is still blooming

And a rather dimwitted Monarch thought there was still time to raise a new generation
(Renee - as you wrote in your Statesman blog, this is not a good idea, is it!)

Oops - someone should get out the ladder and cut those pods of moonflower vine seeds to save for next spring

But the ladder is already in the living room, surrounded by ornaments and decorations boxes, placed next to the Christmas tree so I can reach the top branches.

Being organized for Christmas gets complicated where December acts like autumn.

An Autumn Critter Post

Yesterday the sun shone on the soil yard at The Natural Gardener, and the 87°F/30.5ºC air was ripe with the scent of manure as we filled bags of compost and rose soil. This morning the wind gusted merrily, knocking over potted plants and the thermometer read 53°F/11.6ºC - much more like fall.


Some of the small creatures around our garden tend to disappear once cool weather arrives and my chances for better photos of them are disappearing, too. So these pictures are not art but witness - a reminder to me of some creatures who shared our space in 2008.


Our first Meyer's Lemon tree did well in a container and back in 2006 I debated planting it in the ground but worried about hardiness. Christopher (then in Hawaii but now Outside Clyde in North Carolina) encouraged me to quit dithering and buy a second tree. After I took his advice and planted a second lemon near the house wall in 2007, the tree survived winter, has made a handful of lemons and is now about 5-feet tall.


Lately some of the leaves looked chomped but I didn't know what was eating them. Then a couple of days ago I saw what to the unassisted eye almost looked like a bird dropping on a leaf - perhaps 3/4 inch in length.

But do bird droppings turn their heads when a flash goes off?


This seems to be the caterpillar of a Giant Swallowtail Butterfly - found fairly easily by searching for Bird Poop + caterpillars. A few eaten leaves won't matter on this larger tree so I'll leave it alone and hope for butterflies. The cat even looked a little bigger this morning. If a bird poop caterpillar appears on the other Meyer's Lemon, which still grows in a container and comes inside the house for winter, it will be relocated to the in-ground plant! I want that potted Meyer's Lemon to hold onto its leaves and give me flowers and fruit, but wish the tropical milkweed looked less pristine. I enjoy the flowers but the reason I grow two large plants of this Asclepias is so they can be eaten by Monarch butterfly larvae. This fall I've only seen two Monarchs and not a single caterpillar. I fell like a hostess who sent out invitations for dinner and had no one show up.



How long will the geckos stick around? They're always high up on the veranda walls, catching insects that swarm to the porch lights. None seem to be native - guess this one is a
Mediterranean gecko Hemidactylus turcicus

I've also read that another introduced gecko is found around Austin, so wonder if this pink one on the brick could be a House gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus. Doesn't it look a little like a newly hatched bird before it fledges?There are some interesting other species described here: GeckoWeb Profiles.


Another non-native critter appears on the sidewalk outside the back door when we get rain - small snails. I rarely see snails that look like the ones in cartoons - with a round high-top shell.
Ours are conical brown snails - predators of the round top types. They're used as a natural control in citrus groves. Decollate Snails

Earlier in summer my son noticed an odd insect - it looked as if parts of other insects like a moth, grasshopper and a praying mantis had been glued together. Because one of its legs was missing it was easy to gently place it on the windowsill for a photo before we released it back into one of the big containers where we'd found it. A search found more about our Mantidfly

The large critters are getting bolder! Last year I spent hours trying to sneak up on the squirrels and would have been happy to have a photo like this.

This year I took the first photo, then kept moving closer, and the squirrel held its ground for a close-up. I didn't have any trouble sneaking up on this last creature - because only the name is animal. My friend Ellen gave me a start of a toadlily in early spring and although the leaves show the stress of the hot, dry summer, the flowers still opened. They're about the size of a quarter and don't look impressive at a distance but sure are fascinating when you move in really close.

Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing

"Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose

The adventures may have been bloody but they were cinematic and the blood was not real in the new arthouse movie called The Fall. This visually compelling movie came with recommendations from both Roger Ebert and a trustworthy friend, so Philo and I went to see it at the Regal Arbor a couple of nights ago. We liked it a lot and were enthralled by the performances of a young Romanian girl named Catinca Untaru and by an actor who was unknown at the time this long-in-progress movie was filmed, Oklahoma's own Lee Pace. (Lee is now a favorite for those of us who have fallen under the spell of Pushing Daisies.) Lee's character is Roy, an injured stuntman confined to a Hollywood hospital in the 1920's. The wonderful Catinca plays Alexandria, also a patient, also injured, but mobile and so charming she has the run of the hospital. Roy tells Alexandria "an epic tale of love and revenge" - interrupting his story like Scheherazade in "One Thousand and One Nights". We see Roy's words inhabited by the kind of characters seen in old movies and visualized against some amazing settings. The hospital scenes were filmed first, but it took four years and location filming in 18 countries for Tarsem Singh and his brother Ajit to get this story on screen. The official site is here. A review by Reel Fanatic is here. If this looks like your kind of movie, try to get to it while it's still on the big screen.

The blood is real elsewhere. Mpst of us have discovered that deer, woodchucks, raccoons, squirrels and other animals don't share - they're able to turn an entire crop to compost by taking one bite of each fruit or tomato, or are willing to destroy a garden seemingly on a whim. Most of us just write posts in order to vent our anger and grief over lost crops or plants, but some people go after the varmints with everything from guns to hammers. Read all about it in the New York Times article on Garden Vigilantes. Philo saw the story first and brought it to my attention as soon as I woke up this morning.


Sometimes I read the paper right away with that first cup of coffee, but lately have been taking a quick run out to the tomato patch before breakfast to look for Leaf-footed stink bugs. I don't like to use pesticides anyway, but after reading the level of poison needed to control these bugs it would be out of the question - I don't want to kill off the bees, too! So I take my small bucket with a couple of inches of water in the bottom, lightly sprayed with something like Simple Green to break the surface tension, and in the other hand carry the Green Shears of Death, a pair of stainless steel garden scissors. The bugs are too fast to cut in half, but but by using the point to hold the insect's attention while stealthily moving the bucket underneath him, one jab forward and many a stink bug falls into my pail and drowns. As I scurry around the tomato frame in a nightgown, carrying a bucket and scissors and making triumphant little grunts as another bug falls to soapy death, the idea of me tending a front yard vegetable patch grows ever fainter in imagination.
Some adventures are best kept behind the garden gate.

There will be Flower Photos next time! I promise!


"Swashbuckling, Wood-chunking, and Bug-sloshing" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose Blog.