The tomato harvest was going good and strong, but then the extreme heat came and spider mites started coming out and it was an uphill battle from there. We did get to enjoy a lot of tomatoes though (I was making pico de gallo all the time!), but you always learn something every year. The end of last tomato season we noticed the bugs, this year we were able to identify what they were and how to best deal with them. Next year, we will be prepared on how to deal with them, unless of course, something else happens and we have to adjust to that. There is constant learning and adjusting when it comes to gardening, so much depends on weather and bugs and you really can’t control those. Since we’ve started cultivating our own edible garden, we have such an appreciation for those farmers who depend on their crops for their livelihood. It is not easy and you just never know what factors might come into play to affect your garden.

These are also the last few pictures of this side of the garden looking like this. It is going to undergo a minor little change. The beds will be raised up higher or might even change in material altogether. This side will no longer be for our seasonal harvest, but will have citrus trees growing and all our rotating seasonal fruits and veggies are going to the other side of the yard, where the trees currently are (those will get moved too!). We are constantly learning by trial and error on what works best for our garden. Sometimes I wish I had a magic wand to just wave and have everything done, but gardening takes patience and lots of research, so until that magic wand is invented, I’ll keep exercising the patience part, and I’ll let Ben do all the research.

You all know by now that we love gardening, particularly Ben, and we spend a lot of time working on our garden. I’m excited to announce that my husband is now part of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association! I think it’s so cute! He joined this past month and he went to his first meeting a couple weeks ago (they have monthly meetings). You know how some guys have fantasy football?! Well, my guy has the Rare Fruit Growers Association!  Personally, I think this is way hotter than being into fantasy football, but that’s just me.

I want to go to a meeting with him at some point, but honestly, all that technical gardening stuff is just way over my head and I’m all about just eating eat. Besides the meeting, the following Saturday they had a field trip to a local farm to check out their fruit. This was open to the families of the members, so all of us girls tagged along too.

When we got there we tried something called paw paw, jujubes, and che. We loved them all, particularly the che. One member of the group also made spaghetti squash bread and my girls were happily guzzling that stuff down! Before the tour started though, Glow got stung by a bee and her hand started to swell. Thankfully, I got the stinger out right away and we had medicine on hand, but as you can imagine, that was a bit of an ordeal. Then midway through the tour, Soul got a big chunk of cactus stuck to her ankle, which she tried to remove with her hand, and then we ended up spending a bit of time with tweezers trying to take every prickly piece out (so thankful for a kind lady who had tweezers on hand!). Overall though, we all had fun despite our little unfortunate events, and we were able to finish the tour, and we even went home with a big bag of pomegranates.

Seeing this little place made us dream of having more land to grow fruits and veggies on and for more space for the girls to run around like crazy! There were grapevines there and they just stood there for 15 minutes picking fresh grapes and popping it in their mouths (they allowed us to do that). They were all thoroughly enjoying themselves. That was their favorite part of the tour. It was a such a hot day, but we all had so much fun on this farm.

We’re thankful for our house and how we’re able to transform our little suburban backyard into a garden that works for us, but maybe one day, our fruit farm dreams will come true (not sure if I’m cut out for animals), but hey, you never know!

Oh man, our fruit trees weren’t looking so good. It seems the summer heat wasn’t too kind to the little guys, we knew something was wrong, but wasn’t sure what, so Ben scheduled a consultation with Tom Spellman from Dave Wilson Nursery to come check out our trees. The consultation was a little pricey, but it was well worth the money to know what was going on and to make sure we were doing things right. We were so nervous that all the money we invested into replacing the soil for good drainage was going to be a waste and that’s what might have been causing the trouble with our trees.

Thankfully, Mr. Spellman said our soil was good soil, though he is a firm believer in native soil, so that’s what we will use for the raised beds we will be making soon. Whew! Glad to hear that was not money wasted. Next, he said most of the trees looked good, but 5 would need to be replaced. Whew! That’s not too bad either because I was dreading if all of them had to be replaced. He did say we should have put mulch down (and also gave us a good recommendation for what type of fertilizer to use), which we didn’t due to busyness, but Ben immediately ordered some and put it on a few days later. Actually, Ben ordered so much it’s literally everywhere in our yard. Lastly, he said our trees were sunburned and that a little paint on the trunk would protect them.Therefore, Ben painted our trees. We think it looks a little funny, but we wanna protect them, so we went with Tom Spellman’s suggestion. He is the pro after all! It may look like Ben is painting the trees with ice cream, by the way Salted Pretzel Caramel is bomb dot com, but it’s actually just latex white paint diluted 50% with water.

Tom Spellman pointed out other places in our yard that would be good to plant more trees. Ben had originally thought these spots wouldn’t be ideal, but since we like going with the pro’s suggestions, Ben is already plotting and planning what trees he’s going to get next! Actually, he just texted me and he ordered some sort of mites to put in the backyard because these bugs will be good for our plants, and so our garden learning continues…

This is our first harvest for this year’s tomatoes. So yummy (and pretty)! We all love tomatoes like crazy in our house, and Ben does a really good job picking the various varieties that will do well for where we live. I’m so thankful to have a husband who’s totally into gardening!

Having a veggie and fruit garden takes lots of time (and money), but the great thing is that when you pick it’s free! Last week, I shared about how we planted our tomatoes and our tomato arbor, so if you haven’t read those posts yet, and they are of interest to you, check it out!

Normally, we use t-post and twine to string up our tomatoes as they grow, but this year Ben wanted to try something different, so he used hog fencing that would create an arbor over our garden beds. Buying it new would have been costly, but thankfully we live near a lot of farms, so he was able to find some on craigslist locally. They even delivered it to our house!

We used 16′ x 3′ hog fencing and 3′ concrete stakes (4 per arch). The hog wire was kind of bent in odd spots when they first arrived, so we used the garden beds as a wedge to fix the shape of them (see the picture above where the arches are not lined up yet and look staggered). Then, we centered the short edge of each fencing down the middle of each bed, and used 2 stakes on each side to secure it into the soil. We were able to put 3 arches into each garden bed (our garden beds are 9′ long). It definitely takes two people to get the fencing in; I held the fence in place and was singing the “John Henry” song as Ben hammered in the stakes.

We love the effect the arbor gives and as our tomatoes continue growing, it’s just looking prettier and prettier. The girls also have a lot of fun running underneath it. I love it so much that I just want to keep it up after our summer garden, but Ben’s not sure how well it would work with our winter garden, since he likes to cover it up. We’ll see, maybe we can figure a way to utilize the frame for a makeshift greenhouse, but for now, we will keep enjoying our tomato arbor.

Tomatoes are our absolute favorite things to grow. This year we planted 17 different varieties. We had 29 varieties the first year we ever did tomatoes! That was way too ambitious and so hard to maintain, so as we learn from each previous year’s harvest, we do less and less varieties each year. These are some things we do to prep our soil for our tomato plants and it’s based on what Ben learned from this post on Love Apple Farms…

For every 50 square foot garden space add:
– 5 cubic feet of Gardner & Bloome Compost
– 5 quarts of Gardner & Bloome Tomato, Vegetable & Herb Fertilizer
– 1 quart of 100% worm castings

Once all the amendments are on top of the soil, turn them over into the soil below with a spade fork.

At the bottom of each hole for each tomato plant:
– Fresh fish head (It’s kind of nasty to see and I actually went to the grocery store to pick these up)
– 2-3 crushed egg shells
– Handful bone meal
– 2 handfuls Gardner & Bloome Tomato, Vegetable & Herb Fertilizer
– 1 heaping tbsp worm castings
– Sprinkle 1 tsp Xtreme Gardening Mykos
Note: This is done on the root ball of the tomato plant just before popping it into the hole and backfilling with soil. Mykos is a myrchorrizal fungus that grows along with the tomato roots and helps keep them safe from soil viruses.

Ben does the research for our fruit and veggie gardens, but we all work on it together. We’re so thankful that the girls totally get into it too. We’ve learned over the years that having a garden can be quite expensive and take so much time, but when you finally harvest your goods, it feels so rewarding. I love having our own produce section in our backyard!