I was just looking for a good picture of a tomato plant to show the suckers, and I came across this handy site. Pruning is way down the road, but I like how well the article explains how to do it and includes three basic rules.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Pruning & Tying a Tomato Plant
I was just looking for a good picture of a tomato plant to show the suckers, and I came across this handy site. Pruning is way down the road, but I like how well the article explains how to do it and includes three basic rules.
Tammy's Mater Magic
It's been a full week (almost) since Tammy graced me with five fledgling tomato plants and one tomatillo plant. Miraculously, all have been watered and sunned, put out in warm weather and brought inside at night and on chilly days... In short, they're all still alive and perky looking.
Tammy gave me some great suggestions about caring for them, which are basic... almost idiot proof. She noted that:
Tammy gave me some great suggestions about caring for them, which are basic... almost idiot proof. She noted that:
- I might want to add some dirt along the way, as they get bigger, before it gets warm enough to plant them outside
- When I do add dirt or plant them outside, I'll want to put them as deeply as possible into the dirt --- not just insert the roots alone, but plenty of stem. She pointed out how the stems have little "suckers" (feathery / prickly little looking feelers) that, if put in dirt, will become roots.
- Tammy said if there were lower leaves sprouting off the main stem, I should remove them prior to surrounding that part of the stem with dirt -- otherwise they're likely to carry off on their own and become a separate sprout.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
What Makes a Good Gardener
This article speaks to me... I can't exactly put my thumb on why...... maybe it's how she talks about the shame of the beginning gardener (ahem) about killing plants (ahem, ahem) via any manner of neglect, ignorance, bad luck or naivete (ahem, ahem, ahem, ahem).
Tomatoes of 2009
Remember Steve, my tomato guy from last year? Here are the plants I remember acquiring from him, along with a note on where I put them, and a quick flavor note (for my own recollection). I'm going to do a more comprehensive write up later. Ones in bold are those I must plant again this year:
- Silvery Fir Tree: square foot garden - uggh
- Green Zebra: back garden, pretty good
- Red Zebra: picket garden, a-ok
- Yellow Taxi: picket garden, amazing
- Black Krim: large container, shared, mealy
- Black Plum: large container, shared with Azyochka, a few decent tomatoes, plant looked poorly quickly
- Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge: large container, never really produced
- Azyochka: large container, shared with black plum, barely produced, bad flavor
- Brandywine Pink: small container, looked poorly straight away, produced 3-4 tomatoes, so-so
- Gourmet Yellow Stuffer: large container, alone, all got blossom end rot
- Principe Borghese X2 : large container, shared, great producer, delicious
- Scatalone: small container, most with blossom end rot
- Marglobe: large container, shared, delicious, wonderful producer
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:
I will do better this year! I'd better... for the plants' sakes!
Here are some of the ways I failed my tomatoes last year:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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 will do better this year! I'd better... for the plants' sakes!
How Tomato-Fest 2009 Got Started
Last year, I had it in mind to create a vegetable garden. I thought it would be nice to be able to step outside and collect lettuce for dinner, and I grew up eating farm-fresh tomatoes from Sep's Farm in Long Island. To me, the taste of a sun-warmed fresh tomato is the taste of summer.
My husband, being a fella from Philadelphia, believes that the pinnacle summer tomato experience hails from New Jersey. My husband is a great cook cook and one of his greatest summer pleasures is to get a bunch of ugly heirloom tomatoes and make a delicious salad with them. At some point last spring, I got it into mind that we'd save money (pshaw) by growing our own tomatoes. I also became obsessed with recreating his pinnacle tomato. See... I know exactly how to recreate my "core" tomato experience - next time I'm in Long Island, I'll just stop at Sep's. For my husband, however, it's a little trickier - he's unsure where they got their tomatoes, just that they were probably from New Jersey.
Long story short, I was wildly naive about
A) the cost of creating a garden during the first year. Damn, all that dirt is expensive!!!
and
B) finding my husband's pinnacle tomato - I had no idea there were so many varieties!!!
If I were to rate last year's gardening experience 1-10, with 10 being perfect, I'd give it a 4. But, we're back in for another year and hopefully we'll turn out a bit better this time!
My husband, being a fella from Philadelphia, believes that the pinnacle summer tomato experience hails from New Jersey. My husband is a great cook cook and one of his greatest summer pleasures is to get a bunch of ugly heirloom tomatoes and make a delicious salad with them. At some point last spring, I got it into mind that we'd save money (pshaw) by growing our own tomatoes. I also became obsessed with recreating his pinnacle tomato. See... I know exactly how to recreate my "core" tomato experience - next time I'm in Long Island, I'll just stop at Sep's. For my husband, however, it's a little trickier - he's unsure where they got their tomatoes, just that they were probably from New Jersey.
Long story short, I was wildly naive about
A) the cost of creating a garden during the first year. Damn, all that dirt is expensive!!!
and
B) finding my husband's pinnacle tomato - I had no idea there were so many varieties!!!
If I were to rate last year's gardening experience 1-10, with 10 being perfect, I'd give it a 4. But, we're back in for another year and hopefully we'll turn out a bit better this time!
Steve, My 2009 Tomato Dealer
Last year, I got almost all of my tomato starts from a fellow named Steve who grows tons of heirloom tomatoes to make heirloom ketchup. This is his site: Heirloom Ketchup
When I met up with him in Richmond to buy the plants it was a little overwhelming - he had so many and he only sells them in $20 lots, which was the equivalent of about five or six plants. He keeps this greenhouse in an area of Richmond that borders between highly industrial and residential. On the way in, you pass by all these abandoned greenhouses on lots that are for sale, as well as a scrapyard with people lined up outside with cars full of aluminum cans.
Steve was very nice, and my daughter, then 2, was intrigued to walk around, but the greenhouse itself was in a state of disarray. Steve was in the middle of moving his plants up to his outdoor growing space, near Davis, I think.
Anyway, I came with a list of the ones I specifically wanted, which I had agonized over after reading descriptions on his Craig's List ad, and also on other heirloom tomato sites. As he hunted for the right strains and couldn't find this one or that one, we got to chatting... and he started throwing in extra plants here and there. He is so zealous about his tomatoes that he kept describing each plant in a way that made it seem even better and more fantastic than the last.
The next thing you know, instead of having 6, maybe 7 plants, tops, I walked out with probably 15! You can see Steve's full cultivar list here. I hope he updates his site sometime to include his fantastic descriptions.
When I met up with him in Richmond to buy the plants it was a little overwhelming - he had so many and he only sells them in $20 lots, which was the equivalent of about five or six plants. He keeps this greenhouse in an area of Richmond that borders between highly industrial and residential. On the way in, you pass by all these abandoned greenhouses on lots that are for sale, as well as a scrapyard with people lined up outside with cars full of aluminum cans.
Steve was very nice, and my daughter, then 2, was intrigued to walk around, but the greenhouse itself was in a state of disarray. Steve was in the middle of moving his plants up to his outdoor growing space, near Davis, I think.
Anyway, I came with a list of the ones I specifically wanted, which I had agonized over after reading descriptions on his Craig's List ad, and also on other heirloom tomato sites. As he hunted for the right strains and couldn't find this one or that one, we got to chatting... and he started throwing in extra plants here and there. He is so zealous about his tomatoes that he kept describing each plant in a way that made it seem even better and more fantastic than the last.
The next thing you know, instead of having 6, maybe 7 plants, tops, I walked out with probably 15! You can see Steve's full cultivar list here. I hope he updates his site sometime to include his fantastic descriptions.
Plan to Germinate Tomato Seeds
(above picture snagged from some other site... mine will not be in a petri dish!)My friend and new garden advice goddess, Tammy, gave me some beautiful looking tomato starts the other day. She had started them from seed and, handily enough, posted a great tutorial on growing tomatoes from seeds on her blog.
I'm going to give her method a try starting tomorrow. I'm happy with the five plants she gave me, but my mother-in-law sent some beautiful looking plant seeds from Landreth's as a Christmas gift, and I've got to try those too!
Welcome!
Hi there! Thanks for popping by. This is the first post in my new blog, which is meant to chronicle my amazing feats of killing plants.
I've always been a black thumb with plants - I vacillate wildly between gross neglect, parching plants to the near bitter end, then drowning them, literally, with daily over-waterings. I'm not completely inept at caring for things - historically, animals have blossomed under my care, and I have two small children who have managed to thrive thus far. When it comes to plants, however... not so much.
Despite past evidence of failure, I decided to dive head first into creating a square foot garden last summer. In addition to planting (and killing) numerous lettuces, some corn, string beans, peppers and sundry herbs, we also had about 9 tomato plants in containers. There were some successes, but, in the end, I lost heart because, at summer's end, some of the craftier deer figured out how to circumvent my hoopty deer fence.
This year, 2010, I'm back with a vengeance. We JUST had a great fence / gate built into the end of our driveway, which completely seals off our back yard. Now that I feel we can embrace a new year of plant killing without help from the larger local vermin, I'm ready to give it a try.
I wish I'd kept record of last year's attempts, as I've already forgotten a number of the tomatoes we planted, as well as which ones had better success than others. My mom, a fantastic gardener, had suggested a record, and now I see why.
Also, I'm inspired to share this as a blog because I have gotten so much out of reading my friend, Tammy's blog: http://marinmangos.blogspot.com/. She, too, claims to be a beginner, but that's total BS - she even knows about things like "grafts," "cross-pollination" and "harvests."
Wish me luck!
I've always been a black thumb with plants - I vacillate wildly between gross neglect, parching plants to the near bitter end, then drowning them, literally, with daily over-waterings. I'm not completely inept at caring for things - historically, animals have blossomed under my care, and I have two small children who have managed to thrive thus far. When it comes to plants, however... not so much.
Despite past evidence of failure, I decided to dive head first into creating a square foot garden last summer. In addition to planting (and killing) numerous lettuces, some corn, string beans, peppers and sundry herbs, we also had about 9 tomato plants in containers. There were some successes, but, in the end, I lost heart because, at summer's end, some of the craftier deer figured out how to circumvent my hoopty deer fence.
This year, 2010, I'm back with a vengeance. We JUST had a great fence / gate built into the end of our driveway, which completely seals off our back yard. Now that I feel we can embrace a new year of plant killing without help from the larger local vermin, I'm ready to give it a try.
I wish I'd kept record of last year's attempts, as I've already forgotten a number of the tomatoes we planted, as well as which ones had better success than others. My mom, a fantastic gardener, had suggested a record, and now I see why.
Also, I'm inspired to share this as a blog because I have gotten so much out of reading my friend, Tammy's blog: http://marinmangos.blogspot.com/. She, too, claims to be a beginner, but that's total BS - she even knows about things like "grafts," "cross-pollination" and "harvests."
Wish me luck!
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