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A bad reaction to tomato plants

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My garden is growing beautifully as usual this summer. It’s been quite hot, especially in July so the plants seem to have stopped growing, but that’s ok, they all seem to be healthy.

My tomatoes are growing like weeds. I have four Sweet 100’s tomato plants that are covered in tiny green tomatoes. I can’t wait for them to ripen so that we can have a taste.

I also have five regular sized tomato plants – a variety of patio tomatoes and Early Girl Tomatoes and each of them have several large tomatoes on them in various shades ranging from green to almost red. We’ve already had about four ripe red tomatoes from one of the plants already and they were lovely. Yum.

Unfortunately earlier this evening I seem to have had a reaction to the large tomato plants. I noticed that the tomato plant vines were flopping over so I got some bamboo stakes and some plastic green tape and started staking the tomato plants and within seconds my hands and arms were on fire – burning and itching.

I’ve never had a reaction like that to tomato plants before. I knew that the leaves and plants could be irritating to the skin but I’d never experienced any problems. I had been working with my roses earlier and I had some scratches on my hands and arms so maybe that’s why the reaction was so bad … but man … I can still feel some burning! I had to go inside and take a Benadryl in the hopes that it would calm the reaction down. If I’m still feeling the itching and burning on my skin at bedtime I’ll put some hydracortizone cream on my hands and arms. Luckily I happen to have some prescription cream.

Have any of you ever had a problem with touching tomato plants in the past? Is it an allergy or just a bad irritation? I have had tomatoes come up in allergy tests but I can still eat them most of the time.

BTW Don’t forget to also check out my other gardening blog Organic Gardening Tips. I’d love to have you come visit me over there too!






My garden’s beautiful this month

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At the beginning of this month I wasn’t sure how well my garden was going to do this summer.

You see, we had my neighbors putting in a new fence on one side, and the neighbors on the other side don’t take care of their yard at all so there’s always weeds creeping into our yard from their side, so the month started out in battle mode and it didn’t look good.

I’m quite happy to report that after several weeks of giving our garden some tender loving care – ie lots of compost, mulch, planting new plants in the bare spots, making up my special alfalfa tea to fertilize the garden beds and so on … the plants are looking quite happy.

I’ve actually been out in the garden taking quite a few pictures in the last week, maybe an extra 200 pictures! You see we just got a new cellphone. It’s a Nokia N8 and it has a 12 mpg camera inside it and it takes fabulous pictures and video! I was going to post an HD video that I took with the phone in this post but for some reason I’m having trouble posting it to Youtube. Youtube keeps saying it’s going to take about five hours to upload a 7 minute video. Crazy! So for now … I’ll just post a few pictures and I’ll try to find a way to get my garden tour video in another post soon.

Here are some lovely White Petunias. I always put a few Petunias in hanging baskets near my bird feeders. They help attract more birds, even hummingbirds if I plant red or pink ones.

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Another flower that’s blooming like crazy right now is this Octavia Hill Rose, isn’t it pretty?

Octavia Hill Rose

My Lavender plants are just beginning to bloom. I believe I have 7 or 8 Lavender plants scattered throughout my garden beds. The ones in the sunniest spots are flowering the most right now, but the others will catch up quickly I’m sure.

Lavender

I also have several Clematis vines in both my front and back yard garden beds. This lovely pink/red clematis flower is one that grows on a trellis at the front of my house. The plant climbs along the trellis about 12 feet up the wall. It’s beautiful when it’s in bloom.

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What’s blooming in your garden this month? Is your garden just gorgeous right now? I know I’m loving mine at this time because I have so many roses in bloom that whenever I walk outside all I smell is lovely old rose fragrance. It’s beautiful.

We’ve been very busy in the garden the past two weeks

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It feels like our garden is behind this year. It’s not because this year started out a lot rainier than most, no, it’s because our next door neighbors decided to replace their fence and thus the fence between our two properties had to be replaced, so we spent about two months waiting for it to be put in.

Our garden was on hold for a good part of that time. Oh I did regular garden maintenance on it, such as pruning the roses of dead branches after the long cold winter and making sure the garden beds weren’t full of weeds. However, I didn’t put in any new perennials or plant any annuals until after the fence went in. The shared fence didn’t start going in until the 6th of June so I’ve spent the last two weeks playing catch up with my garden … oh and giving the plants along the new fence tender loving care since new post holes and a big trench had to be dug which likely disturbed some of their roots.

I’m exhausted … but I have to say, here on this first day of Summer, that my garden is starting to look the way I want it to. I must admit that a few weeks ago I was certain that my garden would pretty much be a write off this year. Oh and when the fence was going in I thought that my roses were going to be damaged. I have some very special roses along that fence line – Prince Napoleon, Sympathy and my gigantic William Baffin. I’d hate to lose any of them, but of the eight roses along that fence line Prince Napoleon and Sympathy would have been the worst ones to lose. As it was, we had to lean a few of the roses over while the fence work was being done and Prince Napoleon was leaning right over onto other roses and plants. I thought it was a goner for sure. As it is, it has a terrible case of Black Spot right now because of lack of air circulation due to basically lying on other plants for a week.

Since we’re in Garden and Yard sprucing up mode we sanded off the old paint on the doors of our storage areas under our enclosed back porch and I spent several hours yesterday repainting them. Wow .. everything looks so nice and new now.

Perhaps by this weekend I’ll have slowed down from my outdoor activities and I’ll get around to moving some of my photos from my camera to my computer. If I do I’ll post some pictures of the new fence and how the garden looks now. It does look pretty good if I do say so myself.

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