Having had the foresight to make the run to purchase seedlings last weekend, even though it was bloody miserable out, since I knew that
this weekend I would have to be working during the hours a greenhouse would be open, and having managed not to let any of said seedlings die of neglect in the intervening week, I've gone ahead and bunged my tomatoes in the ground on this nice warm May Day. (Now watch it get cold again, this
is Chicago after all.) BTW, if anyone's still lagging on this, because it
has been pretty damn miserable on and off yet and I could barely even talk Mum into going on the plant run last weekend, the greenhouse across from Shure at the corner of Touhy and Lehigh has many many heirloom tomatoes and I wish we'd known to go there first, 'cos the original plan to have some zucchini for variety went up in flames when we went in place #2 for "the zucchini and 3 more tomatoes" and came out with six tomatoes instead. But since the zucchini didn't produce
anything last year we decided screw it.
Final roster of this year's crop:
(place #1)
better boy
celebrity
big beef
(place #2)
caspian pink
black prince
black krim
cherokee purple
brandywine
siberian
I planted the hybrids closer to the composter because odds are that's the ones that'd get stepped on, although they're all as caged up as I can manage not being able to drive the feet of the cages down in this crap clay more than about 6-8". I weeded the patch first in my usual half-assed fashion (if it's not actively trying to eat me I call it "green mulch" and leave it), which meant pulling out some thistles, a couple of dandelions, the bindweed (which never works but you're supposed to try to keep on top of it), and... whatever the hell this is, which I tangled with
last year:
( Uh... yeah. WTF? )The hole was more than a foot deep by the time I'd got all of the roots up, which I hope I did because chopping it in two when it first appeared last year only seemed to have made it angrier. The thistles and dandelion, not being in seed, went into the composter, but
this damn thing I chucked in the dumpster so it wouldn't end up back in the garden. I have
no idea what it was; last year it sent up a stalk about 4' high with a... um... {
goes to look up a spotters' guide for this sort of thing} -- kind of a spike of waxy white flowers that made berries. How it got there, considering that it wasn't there the first year after they took the decorative cherry out, I have no idea, although I rather suspect that without warning there was this total eclipse of the sun.
The patch on the other side, BTW, is beans, peas, 5-color swiss chard, garlic, and a pot of leeks that begged me to rescue them from Home Despot, but that's all been in for a few weeks now. Slowly, I am learning what will grow here in the first place and how much of it will fit when it does...