garden fail friday: coulda bean a contender; dirtypillow death bed

since i missed last week’s garden fail friday i’m posting two this week. first up: contender bush beans.

about half of them came up the correct way, while the other half behaved like ingrown hairs, sprouting long stems and growing leaves without ever completely popping up out of the soil.

fail #2:

i knew watermelon seedlings hated transplant but i wasn’t expecting this one to totally kick the bucket, and with such gusto. this corpse is a blacktail mountain watermelon, a special open-pollinated variety bred in northern idaho in the early 80s (here’s a great article about them from northwest food news.)

a while ago it looked like i wasn’t going to have space to grow melons at all this year, but then i cleared out a large new bed (the failed “wild area” from last year.) i spent hours digging out all the weeds, excavating huge rocks, adding lots of compost and finally building up some lovely dirtypillows for the melons to nestle in.

off to the side i planted sunflowers, then a triamble/shamrock pumpkin plant, then moon & stars watermelon seeds, then orangelo watermelon seeds, then this blacktail mountain plant. the seeds haven’t come up yet. i had high hopes for watermelons this year but it looks like they might all be fail.

i already replaced the dead plant with a zucchini, and now i’m thinking i might dig into a different dirtypillow and try direct-seeding another blacktail mountain. they have a short enough DTM that it could work.

garden fail friday: i got the (OSU) blues

first some backstory:

one of the tomato varieties i’m most excited about growing this season is OSU blue. it’s an open-pollinated tomato with bluish skin (it’s sometimes purple, dark red or even jet black, depending on the growing conditions and how much sunlight hits the fruit.) it was created by oregon state university researchers using traditional (non-GMO) breeding methods to grow a tomato high in anthocyanin. here’s a great post about them from you grow girl.

i’m growing 29 varieties of tomato this year and i’ve been playing favorites all along. window-front real estate was at a premium for seedlings so i made sure to give the most interesting varieties the nicest, sunniest spots. OSU blue seedlings crested the hierarchy and received tons of preferential treatment.

after planting out two of them i was thrilled to see one take off, quickly becoming the biggest, healthiest tomato plant in my garden. and then it set fruit. and then i saw this:

reisetomate! the easiest-to-identify tomato, unmistakable even at the size of a pencil eraser. and it’s definitely not just a mutant OSU blue--there are two others just like it on the plant.

somehow i mislabeled my tomatoes. i don’t know how this happened...i was so careful. i’m not sure how many are affected. i don’t know if the plants i have labeled as reisetomate are actually OSU blue. worst of all, some of my seedlings died or were aborted, so i don’t even know if i have any OSU blues growing at all.

i noticed this tomato plant, which i had labeled as black zebra cherry, displaying purplish pigmentation on the leaves. i know OSU blue plants sometimes do that but it’s possible black zebra cherry ones do too.

those cute plant tags i made are absolutely useless if they’re marking the wrong plants. this is such an irritating fail. it has me doubting the identity of every tomato i planted.