Water, pints, and pruning

Last week I mentioned I was pruning my tomatoes and peppers. A couple of people asked about how to prune tomatoes. Last year I found this video made Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I think this video communicates the proper way of pruning quickly and effectively. I hope you find it helpful.

My brother commented he heard it was not good to prune peppers. He is right, they should not be pruned. I learned to prune them a bit from an experience I had in high school. I had several peppers plants and no fruit, but with lots of leaves. I trimmed the bottom leaves and the flowers came out and then fruit. I think in cooler climates they sometimes need a bit of stress to flower.

The pepper plants
The above picture shows most of my pepper plants. The plants near the top of the picture were given to me by a neighbor. When she gave them to me they were about six inches tall, and far ahead of my plants. You can see some of the plants in the middle of the picture are smaller. The plants near the bottom are in between the top and middle pics. I decided to hold off on pruning these for a while. The smaller ones may need to get some pruning if they do not flower.

The weather has been hot and dry this past week. However, after looking at the weather almanac we had a week of 90 plus temperatures so we can not complain about last week. I did need to water regularly. When I was watering the corn I noticed something that I had not realized before. See if you can see it the picture below.

Can you see what I saw.
Capturing this in a picture was difficult, but basically the leaves of the corn catch the water and funnel it right to the roots of plant.

The ground right around corn stalks is wet
Watering the roots is the most efficient way to water. This watering system really helps the plant succeed. The use of soaker hoses copies natures efficient watering systems.

The tomatillos, peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers have started to flower or produce some fruit.

Baby peppers

The cucumber flower.

A few Roma tomatoes

The tomatillo flowers
It was also good to see the pumpkins coming up out of the ground.

A few of the pumpkins coming up
I harvested four of the garlic plants recently. Now they are sitting on a window screen in the sun, drying out. They are average sized so I hope the plants that have not turned brown will produce larger bulbs.

The harvested garlic
This past week I picked two pints of raspberries. I also tied the raspberry canes to the “V-trellis”. Using a trellis helps air move through the plants and allows easier access to the fruit.

Yellow raspberries on the left and black raspberries on the right
Looking ahead at the weather forecast I will be watering most of the week. Hopefully the rain will come next weekend. You can see the Cohocton River Rock Micro Farm is pretty brown.

The garden is green but the grass is brown
I encourage you to stop by your local farmers market. The food is great and it helps your community. I hope you stay cool this next week.

Pictures available at http://cohoctonriverrockminifarm.wordpress.com/