Tomatoes, Peppers, and Eggplant Planting in January

Normally, I plan on planting our tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds on New Year's Day.  This year it didn't happen.  I'm six days late, but that's okay.  Better late than never, as the old saying goes.  This year I'm planting the following tomato varieties:

Roma, Mortgage Lifter, Creole, Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chadwick Cherry, Black Krim and Big Rainbow organic.

This year (being late) I didn't do what I normally do and purchase Seed Starting Mix as the medium for planting the seeds.  I used what I had on hand, which was various types of potting soil.  We'll see if that works.  I plant two seeds per seed pot and I always label the seed pots with the variety and the date planted so that I can keep straight what is planted.

I'm also planting the following pepper plants:

Horizon (orange) bell, Hot Jalapeno, Craig's Grande Jalapeno, Anaheim, Banana, Lilac bell, Emerald Giant, and Criolla Sella.

Same thing here, they're labeled and planted two to a seed pot.

I covered with an eighth of an inch of soil and watered them in.  I did the same with Eggplant.  Last year's crop was a PHENOMENAL crop.  I'm hoping they do as well this year.  Unfortunately, I ran out of the Florida Market Eggplant and I'm using Southern Exposure Black Eggplant.  We'll see if this variety rivals the variety from last year.

Now we'll watch for germination.  I keep them inside when it is cool outside and once they germinate, I'll put them under grow lights.  

Still Harvesting Eggplant

Sometimes things work one year and absolutely flop the next.  No matter how you try to think about it, there are too many variables to isolate on what made it work or what made it fail.  This can apply to many things, but tonight I'm talking about eggplant.  Each year on January 1st I start all my tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds indoors in seed pots.  (Hard to believe I'll be doing this again in less than a month!)  Once germinated I move beneath grow lights until the last date of frost has passed and then I'll transplant into the garden.

Eggplant have a particularly long growing season.  You want to get them going early.  Last year, same as every other year I planted.  The eggplant germinated, languished, and gave up the ghost.  This year, using the same seed and doing everything else in similar fashion, they absolutely thrived.  Three eggplant plants have yielded more eggplant than I can count.  We've eaten caponata, oven fried eggplant, eggplant parmesan many times.  We've given some away.  They keep producing.  It is a good problem to have! 

Eggplant have an interesting history.  They are native to China and India.  It was brought by the Spanish into Europe.  Explorers brought the eggplant to the New World, but it did not catch on in American immediately.  As part of the nightshade family (along with potatoes and tomatoes), people thought they were poisonous.  One brave soul finally tried it and didn't die and, well, here we are today, cultivating them in our gardens and eating them in our kitchens.

It is December 1st and the eggplant are still blooming, still producing.  We'll undoubtedly harvest quite a few more before we have our first frost.  I think the flowers are very pretty on this plant.  It is a pinkish flower that the honeybees like to visit.

I took this last photo of another bloom on one of the eggplants and as I looked at it closer, I want to share something with you.  If you look directly beneath the center of the bloom, you can spot the silhouette of a dreaded garden pest I didn't see when taking the photo.  A Stink Bug!

Had I seen that booger, I would have squashed him on the spot.  He (or one of his offspring) will find a place to over-winter and will be attacking our tomato plants next spring.

I Never Knew It Was a Berry!

It blew my mind when I learned that Eggplant is a berry!  What?  How can that be?  Well, This Link explains it:

"Eggplants are berries because of the way they grow and their structure. Berries are fleshy fruits that grow without a pit in the middle. They must also come from one flower with one ovary.

Since they fit that description, eggplants are berries."

Look at this nice crop of "berries!"  I was doing my best to support all the eggplant branches so that they could hold the weight  by wrapping them around the wire cages that support the plant.

There are a bunch of blooms on the plants as well, a promising sign for a bigger berry harvest.

My wife selected two nice eggplant from the garden.  Purple, shiny, smooth.

She sliced them up like you would normally do to fry them, but she had other ideas.  (I looked strangely at her when I observed that she had not peeled the purple skin off of them.)  "You can't eat that!" I said.  Well, apparently you can.  The skins are nutrient-rich.  But you must do it with a younger one, and these were younger.  Tonight, Tricia was making Baked Eggplant Parmesan.  She got the recipe from https://www.loveandlemons.com/easy-eggplant-recipes/

Preheat oven to 400 F.  Slice eggplant into 1/4 inch rounds.

Whisk 2 eggs and 1/4 milk.  In another dish mix 1 1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs, 1 cup Parmesan cheese, 2 teaspoons oregano, 2 tablespoons thyme, 1/2 teaspoons red pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and fresh ground black pepper.  Dip the eggplant rounds in the egg mixture and then into the panko mixture.

Put the eggplant onto a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and bake for 18 minutes or until golden brown.

Meanwhile, Tricia made a marinara sauce on the stovetop.

Spread 1/2 cup marinara on the bottom of a baking dish, layer half of the eggplant and top with 1 cup marinara and half the mozzarella.  

Repeat with the remaining eggplant, the remaining marinara and the remaining mozzarella.  

Sprinkle with the remaining 1/4 cup Parmesan Cheese, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with sea salt.

Bake 20 minutes or until the cheese is nicely melted.  Turn the oven to broil and broil for 2 to 4 minutes or until the cheese is browned and bubbling.  Remove from the oven and top with fresh basil.

This meal was a hit.  In fact, a home run!  We will add this to the rotation and will eat again and again as the eggplant harvest continues to come in.

Random Photos and Thoughts

First things first.  I fixed the link on the Independence Day post from yesterday.  If you were unable to open it, I added a hyperlink that you can click on to view the video.  It is from Paul Harvey and it's very interesting.

Now, today's post is a little different.  I'll show a few photos and explain what's going on.  Normally, posts are topic-driven, but tonight is an outlier.  As the cucumber crop comes to a screeching halt with the high heat, we've been eating the harvested cukes in the vegetable crisper.  Most are eaten raw with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt and pepper, but Tricia did make a jar of lacto-fermented pickles.  It's simply cut up cucumbers pickled in whey.

Our pecan trees haven't made pecans in a couple of years.  I don't know if they are missing some nutrient or fertility or if the darned squirrels are just eating them all.  I do see little pecans in the trees.  Maybe we'll get some this year!  I will try to keep my eyes open for the squirrels, though.  It may turn out that I'll have to harvest a bunch of squirrels if I want to harvest a bunch of pecans.

Tricia made tacos the other night with homemade corn tortillas and sautéed garden squash on the side.  The squash weren't actually from our garden.  Our squash gave up the ghost after all the rain last month.  The tacos and squash were delicious! 

These weren't just any tacos.  They were lengua tacos - Beef Tongue from our bulls we had slaughtered.  They were very good.  They are tender and tasty.   

The eggplant are ready for picking.  We like to eat them fried and also make caponata with them.  They are pretty and purple. 

Finally, here is a Beauregard Sweet Potato in bloom.  You can't see anything above ground except for a lot of vines, but underground is where the work is getting done.  Sweet potato tubers are growing and they'll be ready for harvest this fall.

Just a few random photos tonight.  I hope all is well with your family.

72 Days

Or 10 weeks and 2 days.  Or 2 months and 13 days.  We planted all of our tomatoes (and peppers and eggplant) from seed on January 1st.  72 days later we put them in the ground.  The plants were healthy and green, tall and vigorous, yearning to leave the confines of the seed pots and stretch out their root system in good soil.

I used some baling twine to stretch from one side of the garden to the other.  Then I raked away the wood chips until I got to soil.  The twine enables me to plant the seedlings in a straight row.  It is not necessary to have straight rows, but I like order.  I planted 5 rows of tomatoes, 18 inches apart.  This allowed me to have 13 tomato plants per row, 65 tomato plants total.

I used a shovel to open a slightly deep hole and tossed a handful of biochar inoculated with composted cow manure in the bottom of the hole.  Then Russ planted the tomato, burying it up to the bottom leaves.  The 'leggy' stem will become part of the root system of the plant.  Then Tricia followed behind, pulling the wood chip mulch around the plant to preserve soil moisture and block out weed growth that might compete with the tomato for nutrients.

I planted the following varieties of heirloom, indeterminate tomatoes: 

Black Krim                Black Vernisage            Big Rainbow            Pink Brandywine

Mortgage Lifter        Roma                              Chadwick Cherry    Creole

Cherokee Purple    

Then I planted the peppers, two varieties of of each:

Anaheim        Chocolate        Lipstick        Lilac        Banana        Emerald        Horizon

Then, very far away, in the front of the garden so they don't cross pollinate, I planted six Jalapeno plants - 3 hot jalapenos and 3 Craig's Grande (a big variety for making poppers)  Finally, I planted 3 Florida Market Eggplant.

I climbed on top of the wood chip pile in the back of the garden to capture the newly planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplant and to get a look at the entire garden.

You can see the onion plants in the photo.  They are looking better at this stage than in prior years, believe it or not, after being concerned that the freeze killed them.  We have lots of beets, carrots, chard, kale, kohlrabi to harvest in order to make room for beans, corn, squash, cucumbers, etc.  We'll get to some of that maybe this next weekend.

A New Year's Day Tradition

We were quite anxious to bid farewell to 2020.  One of the things we start thinking about on New Year's Day is an activity that we always try to do on this day or at least as close as we can to January 1st.  We plant seeds for the upcoming Spring Garden!  You may say, "But it's cold outside!"  It is chilly.  Lows in the mid 30's.  Highs in the upper 50's.  But we're not planting directly in the garden soil.  We have at least two more months of cold weather with possible freezes to come.

We're starting our seeds in seed pots.  They'll germinate and when they get their first true leaves, I'll put a grow light on top of them.  They'll grow and I'll keep them indoors until I'm quite certain that we've passed the last freeze date.  Then I'll transplant the seedlings directly into the garden.  It's labor, but it is a labor of love.  

Let's start with tomatoes.  I put some mulch in the bottom of each seed pot, topped it with seed starting mix, put two seeds in each pot and covered with 1/8 inch seed starting mix.  I was sure to label each container with the seed variety and date planted.  Very important that we don't get varieties confused.  We want that information to determine what variety does the best, which variety is susceptible to disease, and which variety we don't get good germination on.  All this is critical information for next year's crop.

We use open-pollinated heirloom seeds so that we can save the seeds year after year if we wish.  This might be a good year to save a BUNCH of seeds.  Ammunition is in short supply, but so are SEEDS.

This year these are the 8 varieties of tomato seeds we're planting:

Big Rainbow         Black Vernissage        Black Krim        Creole        Roma

Cherokee Purple    Mortgage Lifter          Pink Brandywine

Next, we plant peppers - both sweet and hot.  We also plant Eggplant on January 1st.  We prepare the seed pots the exact same way.  Again, planting 2 seeds per pot.  If the germination is bad (it usually approaches 100%), we at least have another seed in the pot.  If they BOTH come up, we'll separate them into separate pots prior to transplanting.

I pulled all of the pepper seeds out of the freezer where I have them double-bagged insulated for storage.

These are the pepper varieties for 2021:

Emerald Green Giant Sweet Bell        Horizon Orange Bell        Lilac (Purple) Bell        Banana Pepper

Lipstick Pepper        Jalapeno Grande    Hot Jalapeno    Florida Market Eggplant

Once planted, I bring inside into the foyer.  My wife isn't thrilled about this and keeps hinting for me to put them outside.  It won't work, I say.  Too cool to germinate.  I spray the soil down with water and then cover with plastic to preserve soil moisture.

We will keep our eyes on the soil, keeping it moist.  Once we see growth, we'll remove the plastic and put grow lights above.  It is always exciting, looking forward to another growing season, anticipating harvests, nutritious & delicious food, and just the exercise and satisfaction of being outside in nature.

Happy Growing!

Getting a Jump Start on Spring

Let's take a look at the tomatoes that I rescued from the carrot row a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, temperatures hit 74 degrees, so they've been really growing!

These tomatoes came up volunteer in the carrot row and I haven't a clue what variety they are.  If I can keep these bad boys alive for two and a half more months, we'll have early tomatoes.  My plan is to put them in the cold frame with a heat lamp on them when it gets cold.  We'll see if we are successful. 

Right now, they are on the back patio.  I walked out yesterday morning to water them and dew had fallen, leaving dew drops on the points of every leaf:

I've never had tomato plants that big during the first week of January.  The first week of January is normally the time that I plant all of my eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes from seed.  This year was no different.  On January 5th I got busy planting.

Here are my Florida Market Eggplant.  I planted 2 seeds in each seed pot to account for poor germination.  Later, I'll weed out the weaker plants.

I planted the following varieties of peppers:
Anaheim, Lipstick, Sweet Chocolate, Lilac Bell, Emerald Giant, Hot Jalapeno, Criolla Sella, Craig's Grande Jalapeno, Horizon, Banana, and TAM Mild Jalapeno.  Eleven varieties in all.  We love peppers!  Most were from seed companies, but two varieties were from seed saved from last year or previous years.

We also planted eleven varieties of tomatoes, including: Creole, Roma, Pink Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Amish Paste, Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Black Vernissage, Thessaloniki, Big Rainbow, and a variety I call "Mrs. Linda" tomatoes.  They are an Italian variety someone gave me from tomatoes purchased at Wal Mart, of all places.  They are prolific producers.

They were planted 1/8 inch deep in seed starting soil.  The trick will be to keep the soil moist until germination.  This light soil tends to dry out quickly.

Once they germinate, I'll bring the grow light inside and position it above the plants.  We'll keep you posted on how the plants grow.

Starting the Garden in January

Early January is cold - even in the deep south - but it is time to get the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant growing.  On January 3rd, I filled my little seed pots with seed starting medium and began planting.  I generally plant two seeds per compartment.  Usually, I'll have close to 100% germination and I'll simply separate the two seedlings and re-pot each individual plant into a larger cup so they don't get root-bound.

After all the seeds are planted, I cover them with about 1/8 inch of seed starting mix and use a sprayer to moisten the soil.  This will make the seeds swell and they'll begin their transformation from a dead seed into a growing plant.  As many times as I've seen it, the way the seed transforms into life is a true miracle from God to me.

Now obviously seeds don't need light until they sprout and begin getting leaves.  Until such time, I bring the containers inside and cover tightly with a plastic bag.  This keeps the soil warm, but most importantly, retains soil moisture so the seeds will swell and begin doing their thing.

In less than a week, we have seedlings springing forth!  They now want light and they jump out of the ground to get it.  You have to be careful or they'll get 'leggy.'  I take the shop light inside from where it normally hangs over my workbench and I position it above the tiny seedlings, propped up by some canned goods.  The grow light has a special fluorescent bulb for growing plants in it.  It gives off a pinkish-colored light.  My growing area is in the utility room above the cabinets.  It stays warm up there and the plants seem to like it.  I keep spraying the seedlings and keeping the soil moist so they plants are never in stress.

The seedlings all germinate at different times.  First the tomatoes, then the peppers, and then the eggplant.  I move them from where I have them sitting in the foyer to the utility room as soon as they sprout.

After about two and a half weeks, the tomatoes all have their true leaves and are growing vigorously.  I have to be real methodical in my watering as the soil dries out fast in the little seed pots.  Probably this Sunday I'll separate and re-pot them into bigger cups that will give their roots room to stretch out.

They are some healthy little plants right now.  Usually after I re-pot them, I'll water them with some diluted fish emulsion.  This gives them a little fertilizer and gives them a nice, healthy color.  We want them to be at their very best when we put them in the ground.  We still have a ways to go, though!

I almost forgot to show you.  As I said, peppers germinate a lot more slowly than tomatoes.  Here are the seed pots of pepper plants.  They are just getting started, but they look pretty good.

Unfortunately, everything doesn't look good.  These are the remaining seed pots in the foyer.  They haven't sprouted yet and if they don't soon, I'll give up on them.

As I was going through my inventory of seeds, I ran across seeds that I had saved from various open pollinated varieties back in 2012 - 2014.  Yes, they are old seed, but I wanted to see which seed I should keep and which I should remove from inventory.  Now, I know!

Even though it is too cold to do much garden prep outside, there's still some gardening to do inside.  And that is a good thing, indeed.

Hardening Off the Tomatoes and Peppers

The last time I posted about our seedlings, I had thinned them out by separating and re-potting those that had more than one seedling growing in a seed pot.  I carefully labeled each container and was able to separate the intertwined roots without losing a single plant.  The only problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that I now have more pepper plants than I can eat.  It didn't take much searching to find several people who will give the extra pepper plants good homes!

So after I thinned them out, I put them out on the back patio in order to 'harden them off.' Hardening them off involves gradually introducing them to cooler outdoors weather and wind.  The operative word there is gradually.  If you do it too fast, you risk shocking your tender plants.  I have a cold frame that I put hinges on and built out of some windows out of an old home.  Someone was throwing them away and had them stacked by the road.  Now they have been re-purposed.

In the first nights, I had a heat lamp shining hot, bright light inside the cold frame, keeping the plants inside warm.  There is a window on the top of the cold frame and while not airtight, it keeps out the wind and retains the warm air inside.

After a few days, I removed the heat lamp and replaced it with the fluorescent grow light that I had over the plants when they were inside the house.  This slowly acclimates them to the variation in temperature and prepares them for the days to come.

In lifting the top off of the cold frame, you can peer down and see some of the peppers and the tomatoes and eggplant.  I had already removed a flat of peppers to plant that I'll show you in a minute.   If something looks a little strange with the tomatoes, I'll show you why.  Gardening is a trial and error thing.  Once the plants get their second set of leaves, I'll spray fish emulsion on the leaves as a foliar feeding.  When plants are young, the label calls for putting a diluted amount of fish emulsion in the sprayer. That would be 50% of the normal amount of 1 Tablespoon per gallon of water.  So I mixed up my little gallon sprayer with water and 1/2 tablespoon of fish emulsion.

It caused the peppers to turn a bright blue green color and literally jump up out of the soil.  It was by far the best looking pepper seedlings I've ever started.  The tomatoes, by contrast, were hurt by the fish emulsion, even though it was mixed at the same concentration.  The tender leaves on the top were burned by the fish emulsion and turned the leaves a yellowish-white color.  It reminded me of damage that the rice herbicide, Command, causes plants to be unable to carry out photosynthesis and thus, they die.  Fortunately for the tomatoes, they recovered from the fish emulsion damage and put out new green growth.  I have made a note for next year that while peppers thrive with a 1/2 Tablespoon to 1 Gallon water mixture, tomatoes cannot handle this.  I'll experiment with a 1/4 Tablespoon mixture next year.

These are the peppers that I put out in the garden this past Saturday.

If all goes as planned, I'll move the tomato seedlings out to the garden this weekend. Once those are in the ground, I'll start working on planting corn, beans, squash, cucumbers and a myriad of other delicious vegetables we like to plant.