Well hello there, and welcome to my little patch of the Web! I'm Betty, I'm a grandmother of three, and every spring since we moved to this house in 1981 I have dug up the same twenty-by-thirty rectangle behind the garage and tried to grow supper in it. Some years I win, some years the groundhog wins. This year, I'm pleased to report, I won, and I have the tomato tally to prove it (see below, and yes, I count them, my husband thinks I'm nuts).

I started this page back in the spring because my daughter-in-law kept asking me when to plant things, and I figured if I wrote it down once I wouldn't have to keep saying it on the phone. Then I got to enjoying it. So here's the whole 1999 season, the good, the bad and the zucchini.

Skip to: Season Log • The Tomato Tally • What I Grew • Pests & Varmints • Fall Chores • Zucchini Bread

Our last frost date around here is May 15, give or take, and I have learned the hard way (1992, I'm looking at you) not to put a tomato in the ground before then no matter how nice it is out. So the calendar goes like this:

The rules: it has to be ripe, it has to come off the vine in my hand, and it goes in the notebook on the kitchen windowsill before it goes anywhere else. Split ones count. Ones the groundhog took a bite out of do NOT count, and there were about a dozen of those before the fence went up (see Varmints). I'll post the final number after frost. I'd love to beat 231.

• Early Girl tomatoes (4 plants). My reliable ones. First to ripen, medium size, good flavor, don't crack much. If you can only grow one tomato in Zone 5, grow this one.
• Brandywine tomatoes (4 plants). The big pink heirloom. They take FOREVER (first one Aug. 7) and the plants are floppy and the fruit is lumpy and cracks if you look at it funny, but the flavor is the reason I garden. Two of my four gave me tomatoes over a pound each.
• Roma tomatoes (4 plants). For sauce and canning. Meaty, not much juice, loads of them. Had a little blossom end rot in July when it was dry; kept the water even and it stopped.
• Cherry tomatoes (2 plants). For the grandkids. They eat them off the vine like candy. These are not in the tally.
• Blue Lake bush beans (3 sowings). Never fail. Stringless, tender, freeze beautifully. Pick them every other day or they get tough and the plant quits. I put up 22 bags in the freezer.
• Zucchini (2 plants). TWO PLANTS. Two plants is too much. I have given zucchini to the mailman. Next year, one plant, and I mean it this time (I said that last year).
• Yellow summer squash (1 plant). See zucchini.
• Cucumbers (a hill of 4). Good year. Made bread-and-butter pickles.
• Bell peppers and jalapeños. Peppers were slow to get going, they want it hotter than June was, but August made up for it. The jalapeños went in the salsa.
• Peas, lettuce, spinach, radishes. The spring crowd. In and out before the tomatoes need the room.
• Carrots and onions. Carrots were forked and funny-looking because I didn't sift the soil enough. They taste fine. Onions did great; braided and hanging in the garage.
• Marigolds along the edge. Because my mother did, and because they're cheerful, and some people say they keep bugs off. The bugs did not get that memo.

Tomato hornworms. Big fat green caterpillars as long as your finger with a little horn on the back end, and they can strip a tomato plant overnight. They're the same color as the stems so you look for the damage (bare stems, big black droppings on the leaves below) and then find the worm. I pick them off by hand and drop them in a coffee can of soapy water. If you find one covered in little white cocoons, leave it be; those are a tiny wasp that's eating it from the inside, and the wasps are on your side. Got seven this year.

Squash bugs. Gray-brown, flat, shield-shaped, and they smell awful when you squish them. They hide under the leaves and lay shiny copper-colored eggs in neat rows on the underside. I scrape the eggs off with my thumbnail and squish the adults, and lay a board on the ground at night; in the morning they're underneath it and you can get a bunch at once. This year they showed up late (end of August) and by then I was ready to be done with zucchini anyway.

THE GROUNDHOG. Oh, the groundhog. He lives under the neighbor's shed and he came into my garden the second week of June like he owned it. He took one bite out of a tomato and moved on to the next one. ONE BITE. My husband finally put up a three-foot chicken-wire fence in July with the bottom foot bent outward and buried, and that did it; they can dig but they don't think to dig back from the fence. Should've done it in 1981.

Rabbits got the first lettuce. The fence fixed that too. Slugs in the wet part of June: a shallow pan of beer, sunk to the rim. Works, and it's the only beer that gets drunk at our house.

1. Cover the tomatoes on frost nights with old sheets, then pick everything green before the hard freeze. Green ones ripen on the counter or wrapped in newspaper in a box in the basement. Or make green tomato relish.
2. Plant garlic. Mid-October, after the first frost but before the ground freezes. Break a head into cloves, pointy end up, two inches deep, six inches apart, cover with straw. It sits there all winter and comes up in March, and you dig it in July. Easiest thing in the garden.
3. Pull everything else and compost it, except anything diseased or the squash vines with bug eggs on them; those go in the trash.
4. Sow a cover crop on whatever's bare. I use winter rye, scattered thick and raked in, by the first week of October. It comes up green, holds the soil all winter, and I turn it under in April. My soil has gotten so much better since I started doing this.
5. Pile on the leaves. All of them. Every leaf on the property goes on the garden or in the compost.
6. Clean and oil the tools, drain the hose, and write in the notebook what to do different next year (ONE zucchini).

Pictures coming when I finish the roll of film and get it to the drugstore. There's one of a Brandywine next to a softball that I'm pretty proud of. Also planning a page on canning if my daughter-in-law will stop calling and asking, but actually she can just come over and I'll show her.

Some gardening friends I've made on here: African Violet Addict (Marilyn, who is even more of a nut about her plants than I am about tomatoes), Hilltop Herb Farm, Willow Creek Garden Center for bulbs and such, Rosa's Kitchen Table who runs our ring, and Grandma Jo's Home Remedies, who I don't know but I like her.