Tag: tomatoes

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Backyard Habitat

Yesterday, I decided to venture forth into the jungle that is my garden to see what kind of damage the weeds have wrought, unchecked as they have been, lo these past three months.  My herbs have managed to hold their own against the weeds (some of them being weeds themselves), and I’ve been helping them along by “pruning” (okay, eating) them occasionally.

A friend had given me some of her extra tomato plants back in April, and they have been thriving, thanks to the red mulch and tomato ladders (oh yeah, and that super something in the NJ soil).

They’re almost ready to eat, but not quite yet.  As I was tying back some unruly branches, some green tomatoes fell to the ground, so I decided to have fried green tomatoes for dinner.  I cooked up some dandelion greens to go with them and topped it off with some fresh purslane, which is an absolutely delicious weed growing in our lawn.  Mmm. The only thing that would have made the dinner better might have been a little chèvre.

On my way back to the house, I passed the pond, which has COMPLETELY overgrown.  Last year I had planted some Anacharis to help filter out some of the decomposing material in the pond.  It’s cheap and apparently a very efficient oxygenator, and I figured if my one frog was still alive, he’d want some oxygen in the pond, no?  One of the common names for Anacharis is “waterweed,” and now I know why!  This stuff has taken over!  The good news is that it’s highly nutrient-rich, so all I have to do is harvest it and throw it on the compost pile for some bangin’ compost…if only I can GET to my compost pile through all the weeds.

I had given up on my one little froggy, since I hadn’t seen him all spring.  I figure he had lived in that pond for well nigh five years, and that’s pretty long for a frog.  But as I passed the pond, instead of hearing the huge croak-SPLASH I’ve gotten so used to hearing when my frog jumps into the pond, I heard eep!-splish! splish!

TWO frogs!  Two little frogs!  So the big frog has gone to the great pond in the sky, but left behind his/her(?) spawn.  I’m surprised there aren’t more frogs (maybe there are, and I just didn’t see them), but I guess my pond is kinda small…plus it’s sort of crowded, what with all the Anacharis about.

I managed to capture one of them with my camera (although in this shot, you can barely see him).  You can see my floating frog house on the left-hand side, which I’ve kept in the pond since winter.  The Anacharis is everywhere!

This shot is a little better.  He actually stood still, eyeing me while I took multiple pictures with my camera, trying not to fall into the pond.  When I got too close, he slipped gracefully into the water.

I know the cats enjoy catching and eating frogs; when I originally bought a bag full of tadpoles back in 2003, I was horrified to find vivisected frog carcasses every so often littering the pathways of the garden.  But perhaps that’s because there were too many frogs for one pond, and they were leaving the safety of the water.

Perhaps it was just nature correcting the balance.  Because recently, the cats haven’t seemed too interested in the pond, other than as a place to snooze.  I sure hope they leave the frogs alone right now, because they’re doing their bit to remove mosquitoes from the environment, and I’m all for that.

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The Case of the Missing Lettuce

I’ve been fortunate enough these past few days to have a little more time on my hands than usual…so much so that I can actually spend time puttering about in the garden, as you can see from my previous post.

A friend started too many tomato plants from seed (despite my warnings that there was something about NJ that makes tomatoes thrive!), and now she’s been giving away her surplus plants. Good news for me, since I’ve been spending all my money at the nursery buying sweet woodruff and tansy and pennyroyal because I’m a big herb geek. As a result, my herb collection is growing nicely, but my vegetable garden is somewhat lacking. These new tomato plants make up for that.

You may be wondering about the red stuff under the plants: that’s red mulch, and it’s supposed to reflect red light back to the plants, which apparently makes the plant produce more tomatoes. I’ve never used the stuff before, so we’ll see…I did need some mulch, though, because weeds in my garden are vicious! And while I was buying tomato ladders, I figured I’d try some of this stuff and see how it works out.

I haven’t been completely negligent with the vegetables; I did buy some Boston lettuce to fill out my little kitchen herb garden outside the back door. I figured that was a good place to put it because if I ever felt the hankering for a salad, all I’d have to do was walk five steps out the door and satisfy my urge for roughage. However, as I was tending to my plants this morning, I noticed that someone…or something…had pilfered my lettuce!

At first, I thought it might have been another mistake by the overzealous weed-wacking lawn guy who destroyed my herb garden last year, but he’s the whole reason I put the little white fence up. Surely, I thought, even he would think twice before going inside a clearly designated growing area before laying waste to all things leafy and green.

And then I took a closer look. This looked to be the work of a smaller animal, perhaps one with a certain amount of intelligence and strength, but not a very good capacity for jumping over fences, because as you can see from the picture (if you click on the pic, you can get a closer view), the fence has been pulled out of the ground, and clearly with a certain amount of force, since Ray and I made sure those things were good and stuck in the ground.


Could it be one of the cats? Somehow I highly doubt it. Squirrels? They are pests, and omnivores to boot, but why wouldn’t they just jump over the fence instead of picking it up? An opossum? They, too, are pests, but I think they would rather just root through garbage or eat leftover cat food rather than go through the trouble of pulling up the fence. Besides, I’m not sure they’re smart enough or strong enough to pull up the fence.

My guess? A groundhog. We do have a resident groundhog in our neighborhood; Ray and I call it the “ground chuck” because I keep confusing the name groundhog with woodchuck (they both refer to the same animal, by the way, and yes, I realize that ground chuck is something one usually finds at the supermarket). Our Ground Chuck has been known to munch on the dandelions in our yard, which certainly has endeared him (or her?) to us. I know they do eat snails and grubs and insects, too, though, so they’re still beneficial animals to my garden, and I’m not inclined to go on the offensive with this guy.

I guess my only option is to either plant a whole lot of lettuce and hope there will be some left for me (doubtful) or just not plant lettuce and let Ground Chuck feast on the dandelions. We have plenty of those, for sure.