I just don’t even know what to do.  The tomatoes are taking over not just the garden but that entire section of yard.  That sad little plant you see hanging out of the garden box on the bottom right?  Those are our (previously huge) basil plants.  The planter to the right has also been taken over by tomato vines.

And the crazy thing is, THERE ARE LIKE 2 TOMATOES IN THAT MESS.  How???

Marsha showed up last week and when I showed her the first thing she said was, “Oh yeah, it looks like there might be too much nitrogen in the soil so it’s not flowering.”

What.

Turns out, I should never doubt what Marsha says when it comes to gardening.  Via SFgate gardening section:

Since tomatoes hate imbalances in soil nutrients, they are prime indicators in the garden when any deficiencies or excesses exist. Adding an overabundance of nitrogen fertilizer can cause abiotic disorders in your tomato crop.  …

Perhaps the best indication that a tomato bed contains too much nitrogen occurs when the plants produce lush foliage but little or no fruit. … Besides fostering heavy leaf coverage, extra nitrogen causes vines to grow to great lengths with few tomatoes to support.

Exactly.

Those white ropes you see in the picture?  A whole system Paul rigged to hold the plants up because the vines were so huge and heavy.  It didn’t work.

We could add bonemeal or colloidal phosphate to the soil to balance the nitrogen content…but let’s be real. That would mean I’d have to go out and find those things and figure out how much to put where and blah blah blah. We’ll probably just pull everything out and start from scratch.

So in addition to no tomatoes, we also managed to shade or push out any other plants in the garden.  All of our squashes have been eaten or rotted away before they were ripe.  We got about three tomatoes, a handful of peppers, and one cucumber.  Oh, but we did get a ton of basil.

Moral of the story: don’t over fertilize your tomatoes early on, and watch for these symptoms so you can nip them in the bud.  Literally.

…and thus concludes Garden Flop 2014.