carrots and tomatoes

Although I have a big vegetable garden in my back yard, I also rent a plot at the Legacy Garden, a community space in downtown Charlottetown.  Why do I do it?  It started because I couldn't get carrots to grow in my own back yard, so I thought I would try a change of venue, and now my carrots are fabulous, if I do say myself.  But an unexpected benefit was the company.  Gardening can be a bit solitary, if not lonely pursuit.  But at a community garden, there is always someone around to talk to about the bugs eating the cucumber leaves, or to brag up your beautiful lettuce.

Here's my plot.  I plant just carrots and tomatoes, rotating them every year.

The sunflowers reseed themselves, growing anew every year.

From 10 tomato plants, I get an enormous amount of fruit.  After all the hard work of nurturing the seedlings, enriching the soil, digging weeds, and planting carefully, it's all worth it to harvest each beautiful tomato at the end of it all.

This tomato plant is a volunteer, growing from seed that must have survived the winter.  It produces big cherry tomatos, and they are really sweet.

The carrots did surprisingly well, powering through even though we had no rain for 2 months.  I always plant the variety called "Rainbow" which produces a range of colours from orange, pale orange, yellow, to pure white. I also plant a dark purple variety.  Last year, I found that the paler the carrot, the more bug damage it sustained.  The purples had no damage at all.  I was delighted to find almost no damage to the roots this year.  Maybe the carrot rust fly larvae don't like dry conditions.

One strange thing I noticed is that the tomatoes growing on the side of the plot facing west are not ripening as quickly as those facing in the other direction.  No shade falls on these plants during the day at all.