This season's urban crops here at the Noe Farm have zoomed past middle age straight into their twilight. It's a little embarrassing. The arugula gave up long ago, and turned into a clump of tall straw-like flower sticks. The carrots and beets started to falter and let their leaves get ugly, so we harvested them and ate them up weeks ago, leaving a desolate patch of dusty blank dirt. Now the zucchini is starting to yawn, and the cucumbers are getting dwarfed by the rogue dandelion that has just sprung up nearby. It's looking like last call at the Home For The Aged Edibles party.
Aside from the promise of late-season tomatoes, this is a pretty depressing scene. If we had a bit more foresight, we might have started some autumnal crops earlier in the summer, so that the new plants could take the torch when the old timers retire. But we didn't do that.
Nonetheless, I think the time can still be nigh for our little garden to get some rejuvenation. Luckily, it's not as if we have a big scary cold winter ahead of us here in San Francisco, so I'm sure we could get away with planting some autumn crops this late. So the question now is what to plant? Any suggestions out there?
Thursday, September 17, 2009
A Second Shot at Tomatoes
At some point soon, we'll post photos of what happened to our beautiful tomato plants. We thought we'd been neglectful, after taking 2-3 weeks of being away from home and regular watering. Fortunately, I came across an article in the SF Chronicle which absolved me of my guilt - apparently this year's unusually cold weather in SF has had a negative impact on tomatoes across the city.
Lucky for us, we planted an additional late batch of some heirloom seeds, which still have a shot at benefitting from San Francisco "summer" which is only now getting started. These guys are supposedly black krim heirlooms, which are supposed to be large beefsteak tomatoes. Looks like ours are a bit stunted, but hopefully they'll still be good.
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