Friday, March 11, 2011

Year Three

A comment from "z" on my last post from May of last year prodded me to update this thing... I have never been very good about keeping up long-term with any type of journal! Maybe this year will be different-- we'll just have to see.

I'm going to paste my response to z's post:

So sorry I fell off the face of the earth after this entry! Last year ended up being pretty much a bust for my maters. I got a some off of every plant, except the Pink Potato Top. As beautiful as it looked when I posted this, it ended up with little leaf-- the bucket I had it in stayed too wet and got overheated. It made LOTS of tomatoes, but they were all afflicted and tiny.

I think my problems last year were a combination of the heat and the buckets I used. As much as I like my homemade E-Buckets, they are just too small for the honking-huge heirloom plants! This year I'm going to try some other, bigger containers.

I'm growing a few heirlooms (Marianna's Peace is still my favorite so I will try to always grow that) but most of what I'm planting this year will be hybrids that are heat-tolerant. I'm hoping that *this* will be my year for a bumper crop!


I *did* get lots of cherry tomatoes last year, and I didn't baby those nearly as much as all of the other plants. Looks like "benign neglect" worked just fine for those! I also had a couple of bush-type plants that did pretty well, so several of the hybrids I'll grow are smaller, determinate types. I'm starting my seeds this weekend-- a little later than I did last year, and I'm hoping that by doing this they'll be less leggy when I go to set them out (and give away my extras to friends and coworkers!).

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