Fail Points on Last Year's Tomatoes

My tomatoes and I, we got off on the wrong feet right away last year. It reminds me of when I bought my first "new-new" car, a Daewoo, and literally ran over a raccoon on my maiden voyage from the dealership to my house in East Oakland.

Here are some of the ways I failed my tomatoes last year:

1. LATE START: I got started too late -I think I bought my starts in late May. My friend Tammy had hers in the ground at the end of April.
2. TOO MANY PLANTS: I got an overwhelming number of plants and did not have proper space for them all, so I ended up putting most of them in 5-10 gallon containers, which would have been fine, but, in order to cut costs, I doubled up a lot of them. Whoops.
   
3. WRONG SOIL: I used an odd mix of soil that wasn't really potting soil for my tomato containers. I think 1/3 of it was my leftover Mel's Mix from the square foot garden we'd cobbled together (yay my husband's great handiwork!), and the rest was organic garden soil - not potting soil. Thus, the water wouldn't have drained properly from the containers.
4. NO FERTILIZER / FEED / NUTRIENTS: I didn't fertilize the soil. Classic rookie mistake for a plant killer like me. I misguidedly thought fertilizing = not being organic and generally assumed that a tomato plant needed to toughen up to stick it out with me and produce, dammit. This year I will baby more!
5. OVER / UNDER WATERED: I set up an automatic water drip irrigation system that kept having a faulty part. Thus, between the tomatoes being planted in poor soil for proper drainage and the fact that the waterer would stop functioning, I basically drowned and dehydrated / cooked the poor plants. I swear, it's a miracle they made any fruit at all!

I know there are plenty of other things I could have done differently, but these leap to mind for now.

I will do better this year! I'd better... for the plants' sakes!