Saturday, June 13, 2009

Getting there!

This is certainly a beautiful sight:






But THIS one is even better!!






This one, not so much though:



I've found three of these little suckers in the last two days-- one today, two yesterday. I'm going to get Thierry to help me spray tonight, because I have no intention of letting them eat up my plants. I'm not sure exactly what kind of 'pillar they are, but I'm going to try to find out by posting the pic on the Tomatoville forum. I've also been fighting off a fungus gnat infestation, which are more annoying than anything else. I'm just hoping that when the tomatoes get big enough, I can get to them before the birds do... I hear mockingbirds really love tomatoes, and we have a lot of those around here.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Entering Week Four...

The tomatoes have been planted out for three weeks now, and they definitely aren't "babies" anymore! I'm glad that the next few days are supposed to be sunny, so they can dry out a bit. The bottom leaves were really starting to curl a LOT, so they definitely need a rest from the rain.



I can practically stand at the door to the deck and SEE them growing taller. Overnight, Marianna's Peace grew up past the first ring of the cage. They all also now have flower buds. Even though I took pics of some from each plant, the only one that came out clearly (because I didn't think to use the macro function... duh!) was the one of the buds on Carmello:



Since they're all starting to get blossoms, I'm going to have to separate them to different areas of the deck. I want to save seeds from them and in order for them to remain true to type, they can't cross-pollinate. They may do that anyway, but it's a lot less likely the further they are apart. I'm also going to top-dress them with some tomato fertilizer, since I'm sure all of the rain has leached out most (if not all) of the fertilizer I gave them last week. If they're getting ready to bloom, they definitely need to be fed!

Thierry and I planted the fifth bag last weekend-- with herbs. I had picked up a couple of pots complete with seeds at IKEA when I bought the plant glides there, and have been growing them on my kitchen windowsill. I also picked up a rosemary plant at Trader Joe's about two weeks ago, and we decided to put them all in the last grow bag together.



Besides the rosemary, there are chives, parsley and basil. I'd like to add a sage plant to the mix, but when I went back to Trader Joe's last night they had already sold all of the herb plants they had the week before. Oh well... I'll have to look for one at the nursery!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Weekly Update

Okay, I'm posting this a bit later than I had intended, but I *am* getting it posted! You'll see that we did get the cages up... actually, Thierry did that all by himself. I asked him to help, and the sweetheart did it all before I could get out there to help him! Good thing, too, because the plants have gotten much bigger. If we had waited, I think it would have been tough to get the cages in without injuring the plants. These pics were taken this past Sunday, May 24.

All four plants, definitely bigger than the week before!



Marianna's Peace:


Carmello:


Paul Robeson:


Goose Creek:


We've been getting a LOT of rain during the past two weeks, and I think it's a mixed blessing. I'm glad that (so far) we haven't had to deal with the hassles we had the year of the drought, and the plants are growing nicely with all of the water. I think it's getting to be a bit much, though, and the plants are beginning to show signs of some stress-- the bottom leaves on most of them are curling, and the Carmello is looking just generally droopy. I just hope that things will even out a bit so that I won't have to worry whether they're getting enough nutrients. They are getting blossoms again-- they got a few right after I planted them out, but I believe that was a reaction to the stress of transplanting them. They were way too small at that point to even think about letting them set fruit, so I pinched off the buds and tried not to feel too guilty about it. I'm relieved to see that they are budding again, and hope that it will warm up enough (but not too much!) so that the blossoms won't drop. This is quite a balancing act, which is funny if you think that tomato plants grow wild in other parts of the world without any problems!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

One Week Out

These plants are growing like crazy... I can practically SEE them grow when I look at them. This is what they looked like one week ago:



And this is what they looked like this morning:



The individual plants are looking really good. I wish I could post these next few pics of each side-by-side, but the dang blog layout won't let me (or I just can't figure out how).

This is Marianna's Peace last week:



Here she is yesterday:



Carmello a week ago:



Carmello yesterday:



Paul Robeson on May 8:



Paul on May 15:



Goose Creek a week ago:



And this week:



I'm especially glad to see how well Goose Creek is doing, and not only because it was the most expensive of my four seedlings. It's an heirloom variety that has a really interesting history, having been brought to the Lowcountry of South Carolina by a slave who smuggled the seeds in her skirt when she was brought to Charleston. Her Gullah-Geechee descendants have passed the seeds on to each generation and now her great-great-grandson (who is an edible landscape expert) has made them available to gardeners everywhere. I can't wait to try the tomatoes from this plant, and so far it's looking good! In fact, the plants are all looking so good I'm going to have to get Thierry to help me put up the cages for them sometime this week.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Last week I got my four tomatoes planted, but I had to do it two different days. I started on Wednesday evening, but only managed to get two of them done before a thunderstorm came up.

First, I had to hydrate the coir. I took a block of it and put it in a plastic tote I'd bought at IKEA for just this purpose.



I then started adding water to it. It took about 8 gallons or so, overall, and I kept breaking it up by hand every so often. This is what it looked like after I added the first two gallons of water:



I later found out that I'd have been better off to add the water then go do something else for a while. It will hydrate just fine on its own, and doesn't need any "manual assistance". I thought it would speed up the process, but instead it just wore me out-- I was exhausted by the time I was done with the first two plants! Here's the coir about halfway to being completely hydrated:



I then started filling the growbags. Here's an empty one:



And here's one filled with coir:



I then simply made a hole in the middle of the coir and put some organic fertilizer (Espoma's Plant Tone) in and mixed it into the coir in the hole. I then pinched off the bottom half of the branches/leaves on each plant, and placed the plant into the coir. I filled the hole, pressing the coir gently against the plant stem and making sure to cover the stem up to the level of the bottom leaves. The parts of the stem where I pinched off branches that are buried will send out roots, making a larger and stronger root system than the plant would have if I simply plonked it into the hole "as is". Here is the first plant, Marianna's Peace:



And here are both plants after I finished the second. You can see how dark it was getting because of the oncoming storm:



I finished the other two on Friday, and felt quite accomplished when I was done. It took me a lot longer to do the first two than the second two, I'm sure because I had no idea what I was doing at first! Here are all four of them, finished and ready to turn into monster vines bearing lots and lots of tomatoes (I hope!):



Once I figured out how to plant in the growbags, it was very easy and I enjoyed it. I actually found myself wishing I had more things to plant. I do still have one bag and enough coir to fill it, and I sure don't want it to go to waste. Thierry and I are still trying to decide what to plant. Right now I'm leaning toward carrots, but I'm very tempted to try Belgian endive... it's one of Thierry's favorite vegetables, and expensive to buy in the store. He's been visiting family in Belgium for the last two weeks-- we'll decide about what to plant after he gets home this Sunday!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Getting Ready

Our soil here is utter crap (clay, full of rocks) that would literally require a pickaxe to break up, nevermind then having to work a ton (literally) of compost and other good soil amendment into it to get it in shape for gardening. Instead of in-ground gardening, I've purchased Easi-lift growbags to use as growing containers, which I’m going to put out on our deck. I bought them from Peaceful Valley and they shipped them very promptly. The bags are a reasonable price, but Peaceful Valley did have a minimum order of 5 bags. So, I have one bag left over and I’m trying to decide whether to pick up another tomato plant at my local nursery, or something else. Thierry is voting for something else, but I’m not sure what to choose— he doesn’t like cucumbers, squash or eggplant (all of which are, in my experience, very prolific so just one plant should give us plenty of veggies).

I still have the Earthbox my mom gave us years ago, but according to my research the tomatoes should do better in these bags which are large (15 gallons each) and will therefore allow the plants to grow much larger root systems. I may use the Earthbox for something else— maybe some herbs I’m sprouting (more about them another time).

As for the plants I chose, I really want to grow heirloom tomatoes. My mom grew German Johnsons a couple of years ago and even though they were “high-maintenance” in her opinion, the flavor of those tomatoes was unbelievable. Also, I like the idea of growing varieties that have a history, and weren’t developed in a lab somewhere. After more internet research, I ordered four heirloom tomato plants from Laurel Garza (super friendly, and answered the phone herself!)— Carmello, Goose Creek, Marianna’s Peace, and Paul Robeson. It looks like these are fairly heat-tolerant (it gets mighty hot here in Concord) and should do okay in containers. When they arrived, they were packed very carefully and were in great shape for having traveled all the way from California! Shipping costs were a bit pricey, but it was definitely worth it. I would not have been able to find these varieties at a local nursery, and the way they were packed was truly ingenious; I wish I'd gotten some pictures as I unpacked the box they came in. However, I *did* take some pics of the plants not long after they arrived and they are beautiful!



The Marianna's Peace plant is the tallest and the bottom leaves were yellowing a bit because the seedling was outgrowing the pot! All of the plants, though, as you can see were in great shape and I was just itching to plant them.

Since I am using the growbags I needed some sort of mix with which to fill them. After reading the Dave’s Garden website for a few days, I liked the sound of coconut coir instead of potting mix (although I could have blended the two)… I’ve never enjoyed getting my hands dirty with actual DIRT. So, I ordered enough of the coir from InstaGarden (run by a fellow known on Dave’s Garden as BocaBob) to fill the bags.

After a trip to my local nursery, I came home with two types of fertilizer—one for foliar feeding and a granular tomato fertilizer. I also got some “blossom set” spray, which is supposed to help increase yields by preventing blossom drop. That occurs when the weather gets hot, which it definitely does in this neck of the woods! After that, I had the most important things I needed to get the seedlings "bagged up" and, hopefully, growing like crazy.

Next post – transplanting the seedlings!

Saturday, May 9, 2009

A Little Introduction

As I wrote in my profile, my experience of gardening when growing up was reluctantly helping out in my parents' vegetable garden. Every year they would plant a large garden at my granny's house in the mountains of Virginia, and every weekend we would go there and tend to the garden. As much as I hated grubbing in the dirt, I did enjoy (most) of what came out of that garden: corn, beans (string & butter), squash, zucchini, potatoes, asparagus and (my favorite) tomatoes.

I don't remember ever eating a store-bought tomato growing up-- I guess we were just spoiled and lucky. What we didn't eat fresh, my mom canned and the stewed tomatoes we had in the dead of winter would take me right back to summer. My parents haven't had a garden in years, though, and I have never been a big fan of gardening. As the years have passed, though, I've started to miss truly fresh, homegrown vegetable more and more, and none more than my beloved tomatoes.

My husband Thierry and I have tried twice in the past few years to grow tomatoes in an Earth Box (very generously given to me by my mom) with mixed success. The first time (about 8 years ago— wow, time flies!) we were living in an apartment so the box was on our balcony. I honestly can’t remember where we got the plants (two of them) or what kind they were, but we got enough tomatoes for us although it definitely was not a great yield. I think it’s because we didn’t really know what we were doing, plus we had to fight whiteflies for most of the growing season. That's when we discovered insecticidal soap-- I much prefer organic solutions when possible.

Our next attempt was in 2007, and THAT was a disaster. Thierry did pretty much all of the plant care that year, but he does not come from the same gardening background I do— even though I never particularly enjoyed working in the garden, I at least had some experience with it. Thierry grew up in the city in Belgium and had very little gardening experience. He was a trooper, though, and really tried in 2007. Unfortunately, that was a heatwave/drought summer here in NC. We got a grand total of two tomatoes from our plants (purchased at K-mart, again no idea what kind) before the hornworms invaded. I never knew how squeamish my husband could be until he saw his first hornworm! He gave up on the plants at that point, and given the bad shape they were in I didn’t think I could “rescue” them with my limited knowledge.

Thierry was so put-out by the 2007 debacle that I didn’t even mention tomatoes last summer. This year, though, I told him that I really miss REAL tomatoes so I wanted to try growing them again AND that I would be doing the work this time around. He is very skeptical, but I don’t think he realizes just how much I want to taste a real tomato again! At any rate, because he IS so skeptical I feel like I’ve got something to prove here. Unfortunately, I remember very little of what I learned about tomatoes growing up. I’ve been doing a lot of research on the internet and although I still feel like I really don't know what I'm doing, I'm willing to give it a try.

It's going to be some work, but I'm pretty sure it'll be worth it. I'm keeping this blog so that I can keep track of what works and what doesn't, for my own future reference as well as for others out there who may be thinking of doing something similar. In the current economy, I'm seeing more and more info and encouragement on "growing your own food" so I believe that more of us novices are going to be trying our hand at gardening. It may be frustrating, but I'm sure it won't be boring!