“My” poor neglected garden.
I figured the masses of tomato plants would die out between the fungus that made its way through and the bitterly cold (for SoCal) weather. But… there were still a few little engines that could.
So over the past few days I’ve been cutting everything dead off the survivors and adding supports, feeding them, and so on.
Meanwhile, some tiny herb plants - that weren’t doing much while the tomatoes thrived - have colonized some of those pots, which is interesting. So I have three giant pots of parsley, a couple with rosemary (still tentative, surprisingly, because it grows like crazy in the wild around here), plus one of mint (that I cut some stems off the other plant as a regrowth experiment) that’s starting to do very well.
I also DIY-trellised my white pea experiment reusing tomato stakes and netting.
And I moved the poor dehydrated papaya plants into bigger pots - hoping they will survive, apparently they hate transplantation. But they’re little trees now, and the pots were way too small. Hoping that some food, water, and a bigger home will bring them back.
Kale is still going strong, except for an intermittent fungus issue that the green-thumbed neighbor says I can’t do anything about, but I need to research.
Harvested my first beets, and replanted the ones that need to grow more, giving them more space. Interestingly, one of the beet stubs I had stuck in the pot along with seeds actually regenerated! The other ones sprouted leaves, but stayed flat, and all research had indicated that’s all that would happen. So strange, and also wonderful!
I had stuck some scallion ends in two small pots and they have done miserably this whole time, so I moved them into empty tomato pots - let’s see if the space and constant water supply changes things. Other scallion ends that I stuck into other plant pots have done swimmingly, so it’s a puzzle.
Final (I think?) remedial work today was to repot the lemongrass to give it more space in the hope that it will get going again - I split it into 3 pots.
Oh yes. Something needs to be done about the peppers. Maybe next week. Surprise (duh) to me was that I have red peppers growing too! They took forever to turn red.
Phew. That’s what months of neglect does. I’m feeling so much better now that the plants have been tended to!