"Garden" Experiments

Just a few updates on the "garden" (such as it is):

My four tomato plants (three pictured here) have grown but have been very slow to flower and even slower to fruit. I'm doing a couple of things to try to speed the fruiting process:

1. Vigorously shaking their cages daily (which shakes the plants). Because tomatoes are self-pollinating, this has the potential of causing pollen inside the flowers to be distributed. And it stimulates root growth. (Lots of nursery growers run their hands over the inches-tall seedlings in their trays daily to simulate high winds battering the plants, which stimulates root growth in the seedlings as the plants try to anchor themselves against natural forces.) AND, I read recently (this is in the hocus-pocus category), if plants lead too calm a life, they aren't motivated to reproduce, i.e., bear fruit (seed). They think, "Life is good" and aren't motivate to do the hard work of reproduction thinking their lives are going to be good forever. So rattling their cages daily serves as a wake-up call that life is about to get more difficult and if they want to leave a legacy they'd better get their reproductive organs in gear. We'll see.



2. Also, to stimulate fruiting, I prepared a mix of water, household ammonia, and vinegar (to which I also added sea water). Some sources even recommend adding a bit of Coca-Cola (not sure why). I don't know the science behind this mix, but it is supposed to stimulate flower reproduction on tomatoes like crazy. I've foliar-fed the four tomato plants with this spray -- using an electric misting machine I bought a couple of years ago that atomizes liquid into super-fine droplets that cling to the leaves. While I'm waiting on the tomatoes to respond to this application, I did notice this morning that one of my decorative shrubs (don't know the name) that sits right next to one of the tomato plants, is putting out tons of white flowers! It got wet with the overspray from the tomato plant next to it and is showing flowers just in that section of the shrub. (I have three of these large bushes and there are no flowers anywhere else except next to this tomato plant where it got over-sprayed.) The little white flowers are hard to see --



I now count NINE avocado trees coming up in the front beds! I'm at a lost as to what has caused this sudden germination, but think it must have something to do with the amount of rain we've had lately. Last summer's drought may have kept the avocado pits dormant, but they have sprung to life this summer. Several of the nine are tall and spindly as they are reaching up for sunlight amidst the thick growth of shrubs. I hope they'll make it -- here are two that get good sun:





I had a large organic sweet potato in my vegetable basket that I hadn't gotten around to eating, and it dutifully began to sprout at the top end. Rather than take the time to follow Daniel's excellent rooting instructions earlier this year, I decided to take the potato and plant it in the ground where I used to have my compost bins. I have been stacking my used wheatgrass root-beds in that same location the last few weeks in anticipation of restarting some compost bins. Several of the beds had decomposed nicely, so I planted the sweet potato vertically with the sprouts sticking above ground, then used the decomposed wheatgrass beds to make a "collar" of support around it. We'll see what happens.

The overview:



Closeup:



That's it from the garden for now. I'll report on the tomato flowering foliar spray in due course.