Friday, September 27, 2013

Hydrangeas in the Fall


I know the Fall is coming when the hydrangeas begin to turn pink.  These Limelight PG hydrangeas take on a beautiful rosy/blush colour in the late summer / early Fall.  It's quite a spectacular plant as the flower clusters grows to quite large size - you can see it from a mile a way (well, not exactly a mile, but far enough).   This is probably the plant I get the most compliments on consistently on a yearly basis (and it requires the least amount of work - all I do is trim the branches in the Spring!)


Saturday, September 14, 2013

Tomatoes this year

This has not been the best summer for my tomato plants.  This year, I planted two variety of tomatoes - Caspian Pink tomatoes and Big Rainbow tomatoes.  I decided to try planting larger tomatoes rather than Cherry tomatoes like last year to give it a try.  I had a late start with starting the tomato seeds this year, so the seedlings were small to begin with at the beginning of summer.  The cool and wet summer weather we've been having didn't help either.  I took the plants till early August to form fruits.  


The tomatoes actually stayed green for a very long time, almost one month.  I think it was almost the beginning of September when the first tomato turned orange/red.  

 Unfortunately I think the tomato plants were blighted (late blight) so by the time the fruits were changing colour, some of the leafs and stems were starting to turn brown.  At the end of the season, we only got a handful of edible tomatoes, rather disappointing results from five tomato plants.  I did a bit of research and found some resources on how to prevent tomato blight.  I think the key will be in air circulation, as well as having variety of tomato species (going to plan some cherry tomatoes for sure), at which some species are more blight-resistant than others.  I will need to start the seeds much earlier next season to ensure the seedlings have plenty of time to develop before going outdoors.    

Also, some warmer summer weather would help as well (keeping my fingers crossed for next season).   

Here's a good link to some resources related to tomato blight: 

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