Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Planting Tomatoes


I did a little May Day garden work and transplanted my tomatoes in the ground.  This wasn’t the success that I was hoping for.  I started plants from seed 8 weeks ago but they didn’t do well.  I kept the starts in my newly constructed green house.  While the “green house” did a great job of preventing my lettuces from getting frost bite over the winter, the air temperature was too cold to get any real growth out of the tomato starts.  They’re still very tiny plants, so I gave up and bought some.  Next year I’ll go back to starting them in the house.
Hopefully, my new staking method will be more successful.  Last year, I was intrigued a method used by a fellow blogger, Kenny, at Veggie Gardening Tips.  He has an excellent video on staking tomato plants.  I thought this was a wonderful idea, to keep the plants up, off the ground.  Mr. RK put two poles in the ground and attached gridded wire across them.  By keeping the tomato plants tied to the wire as they grow, the tomatoes plants will not turn into a giant bush and fall over, like they usually do.  They’ll get more sun and hopefully ripen faster.  It will also be easier to find and remove any horn worms.  All of the materials were found/left over from other projects, so it didn’t cost us anything!
I planted four varieties this year.  Large heirlooms for slicing and eating fresh, Ace for canning, plum for sauces and cherries for our salads.




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