December 7, 2008 at 9:42 pm (gardening)
Tags: blossom, blossomdrop, drop, tomato
All the tomato seedlings that I had of 3 varieties are now in their respective 20L containers and few of them have already started flowering.
But unexpected caught my sight, the flowers are falling off just a day after they bloomed. This is only on the cherry tomato. On googling I found out it is “Blossom Drop” which can happen due to any of the following
- Extreme temperatures.
- Stress
- Too little or too much Nitrogen.
- Humidity.
- Too much water.
These tomatoes are in the balcony right now taking bangalore’s cold nights and not enough sunlignt. I am planning to move them to the terrace to provide them ample light and see if it stops the damn drop. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
<Frustration>
With just 12 pots I feel so frustrated and there are farmers in india with acres of land ready for harvest only to have it destroyed by rain/flood the same day. Too bad.. I will be very happy if vegetable prices go high. Let the world outside know how much trouble these farmers go through and yet how cheap we get the veggies for and still bargain on top of it. We only bargain to these poor people and empty of wallets silently to shopping malls, realtors and for entertainment.
</Frustration>
gg
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December 7, 2008 at 9:33 am (gardening, medium, seedstarting)
Tags: bangalore, chitting, potatoes, sacks, soil mix, starting
This post was due since long time, but lot of things happened in the country that made these things very insignificant. Here goes..
Last time I had a potato plant grow
ing like any other in a pot and me being the impatient kind, I dug it up little too soon and I ended up with 3 fairskinned potatoes 
. Then I looked up the web to know the way it should be done and I set out to do exactly the same way.
Potatoes belong to the same Family as that of Tomatoes. Interestingly they start from tubers and not seeds.
Chitting:
“Chitting” is the term that is used for the process of sprouting potatoes. There are several pages on the web showing how to chit a potato. I am not going to go into details on that since ‘I’ didnt chit the potatoes I planted. It was my friends mom. I went to their house kitchen and Voila! a bowl full of potatoes with sprouts eager to see the world and needless to say what happened next. Those fellas ended up in my garden and I skipped the chitting part.
Planting:
I potted these potatoes with sprouts into 4.5 inch pots and with in 3 days the plants showed up. The mix was peat, perlite and sand mixed. They had such a vigor and strength that I never had to fertilizer even a bit. The root system was also well developed. I was amazed by the amount of food stored inside the tuber for plant growth.
Date: Nov 2nd 2008.
Roots:
. I transplanted the plants at this stage to polythene sacks(mostly the ones that manure comes in). Pictures of the same are below.
Date : Nov 6th 2008
I started out with just 6 inches of soil mix and planted these plantlets. As they grew I added more soil. Now the bags are a little more than 2 feet. Boy! thats lots of mix.
Date: Nov 8, 2008
This is what they looked like once done. Date: Nov 8, 2008
Grown plants with flowering buds.
Date: Dec 7th 2008.
And the entire battalion.
After it had flowered, I learnt from the web that there will be some early potatoes that would have formed. I did a test poke into the soil to a depth of 3-4 inches and Oops…. My fingers felt something that feels like potato… It better be one
Harvest:
Its not time for harvest yet. The sign for maturity is yellowing of leaves and plants die back ( or my running out of my patience.. which is usually the case). Will update this blog once i harvest those tubers….
More later.
gg
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