Garden tour: peppers, tomato problems & cover crop plans



I give a tour of my home and community rental gardens and talk about challenges I’ve been having with tomato disease plus my plans for next year as well as cover crop plans.

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24 thoughts on “Garden tour: peppers, tomato problems & cover crop plans”

  1. Hi Esther. I'm very glad you are OK after covid and that you're recovering. It's great to see you back, but don't overdue it! The cardinal basil is gorgeous, do the bees love it?

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  2. So glad you are feeling better! I have a comfrey plant that I use for fertilizer. You can make a tea or just add leaves to your soil or compost pile. It can seed prolifically and will also form a pretty big clump. Beautiful flowers though and bees love them. I just cut off the flowers before they set seed. There is a Russian type that does not seed.

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  3. I'm glad you are feeling better. My toms didn't produce as much as I'd hoped either. I'm sure it was the heat this year. But still I did can 20 pints plus all the fresh we wanted. I only have a few more to harvest. Maybe one or two pints.

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  4. Wonder if planting plants close together might cause disease? Also, just learned after winter sowing brocolli, chard, cauliflower and cabbage, to plant those in ground in April in zone 6. By the time those get picked in June, plant summer plants that were winter sown. Still learning here!😁 Anything to help with inflation!

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  5. So sorry you have been sick. Thinking of you as you continue to recover! I agree on the heirloom dilema–I love me some Cherokee Purple tomatoes, but I had to add some hybrids to the garden for more dependability. Your garden looks great–particularly the FLOWERS!!

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  6. Wishing you a full and speedy recovery! Please continue giving yourself grace and rest. 💓 I’ve mentioned before that herbicide/pesticide contamination is common in soil at community gardens, but so is blight, unfortunately. 😥 Have you had a chance to survey the other plots, other tomato plants? They’re most likely struggling as well. 😞

    I highly recommend growing “Sunrise Sauce” tomatoes if you’re looking for high yield, amazing tasting paste/canning tomatoes (fantastic raw as well)!!! Only F1 Orange paste/Roma style tomato available. Days to maturity is short, like 68 days. They can be grown in succession. 40+ tomatoes on one plant at a time. Early maturity and perfect for succession planting!!

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  7. Glad you're in recovery!!
    Soooo… Guess what I just added to my seed buying wishlist (trying to add as I think of things and do one order later, instead of multiple orders like usual 😁) – jimmy nardelo pepper! Thanks for the recommendation 👍
    I did a mustard seed cover crop before that worked well! Might do that again too.

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  8. Thank you so much for sharing about your tomatoes, etc. I was wondering why my tomatoes weren't producing and now I know why. Even my zucchini and sugar baby watermelons were screaming that it was too hot for them. Full sun doesn't mean weeks of 90+ degree heat coupled with high humidity. So glad you're on the mend from the virus!!! STAY WELL

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  9. I'm glad that you are back in the garden…hopefully the lingering symptoms go away soon.

    I have a couple of tomato suggestions for you: Juliet and Mountain Magic. Both are hybrids and resistant to blight, but they have amazing tomato flavour (which can't be said for a lot of the hybrid varieties). In fact, Mountain Magic was specifically bred to be blight resistant AND have great flavour. The seeds are a little pricey (or at least they were a few years ago when I purchased them) but well worth it if you have heavy disease pressure.

    We are always learning in the garden aren't we? The great thing is, each year we have a fresh start with those lessons under our belt 🙂 P.S. I absolutely love those Thunder Mountain peppers! I've added them to my list for next year. AND I found Lemon Drop to be crazy hot so I wouldn't take a bite like you did with hot peppers last year, lol!!😜

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