Indigo Rose Tomatoes have set....          


With all the rain and warm temperatures that we have had, the garden is growing like gangbusters!  We have small tomatoes developing.  They are the Indigo Rose variety... a new variety of tomato developed at Oregon State University.  

From Wikipedia:  Blue tomatoes are tomatoes that have been bred to produce high levels of anthocyanin, a pigment responsible for the blue and purple color of many fruits including blueberries, blackberries and chokeberries. Anthocyanin has been identified to possess antioxidant properties.

Researchers at Oregon State University have produced blue in tomatoes using conventional breeding techniques, cross-pollinating domestic tomatoes with wild varieties that exhibit the "Anthocyanin fruit" (Aft) gene.^[1] As of the 2012 growing season, Oregon State University developed blue tomato seeds became commercially available under the name "Indigo Rose Tomato." The blue color is produced on the outside of the tomato where the fruit is exposed to direct sunlight. The shaded side of the fruit is green when unripe, red when ripe, and the inside is red or deep pink. The tomatoes are small, about 2 inches across, round, and grow in clusters of 6 to 8. Flavor is described as slightly acidic. The vines are said to be indeterminate but compact, and disease resistant.

In the above picture, you can see the squash plants have increased dramatically in size.  That one row of smaller plants are cantaloupe... just not thriving like the squash.   The picture below shows we even have some small squashes developing on the Ronde De Nice variety.  

I have several crops of lettuces that are ready and almost ready!  Radishes are again ready to pull.  

We had some wind during a rainstorm the other night and it kind of tossed around the Cascdadia Snap Pea plants, but they don't seem to be damaged... just toppled over a bit.  And look at the peas... I will pick some tomorrow!!!

I thinned the carrots to be about 1" apart.  That is the carrots... those little wispy looking things in the foreground of the picture below.  The tall plant in the back is tomatillo... Looking verrrry healthy!

Potatoes are almost ready to be hilled up again!  Walla Walla Onions in the foreground seem to be doing OK.

I noticed that one of the raspberry plants that was doing so well has apparently died!  What a shock. The last  time I looked, nine out of the twelve raspberry canes I had planted were doing extraordinarily well...  the leaves were green and healthy!  Now the leaves on one of the canes have shriveled and turned black.  I do not know what has caused this.

That is it for today!