It’s time for one of my favorite things to do in the garden- plant tomatoes. After experimenting with over 20 different varieties last year, I’ve decided to keep it simple and plant only a few this year. This is partly because I want to plant more leafy greens, but also because my first attempt to start seeds was a bust. They started out beautifully, but the cold weather week in March made it difficult to keep them growing as well as we normally do. So, I had to take a step back. Of course, we must grow our tried and true Better Boy as a hybrid. Lemon Boy was about the same, and hopefully, those seeds will take off in time for planting in May. In terms of heirlooms, we’re trying German Johnson and Chocolate Cherokee as trials this year. Kellogg’s Breakfast did fairly well in terms of taste, so we’ll have that along with Cherokee Purple and Brandywine. If we ever finish some of our home projects, there may be time to start another favored slicer that didn’t make it through early seed starting this winter. But either way, we will snip and save suckers as soon as the plants begin to take off. They will provide us with healthy plants to last through frost. And we don’t have to bother with seeds! Read about cloning tomatoes here. Cherry tomatoes will always hold a dear place in my heart. Picking them outside my grandmother’s door when I was growing up is the primary reason tomatoes became a favored fruit for me. If you want a prolific cherry tomato, you absolutely must grow Super Sweet 100. It sprawled all atop the chicken coop last year. We really couldn’t control it, and we gave tons of tomatoes away. So, we’ll definitely grow it again but in a place where we can better manage it. Sweet Million is a good one as well. Instead of Yellow Pear, which is also one you can just let go and watch it grow, we are trying Sun Gold. I’ve read in many of the tomato and gardening groups I frequent that this tomato is the number one cherry variety. I’ll be sure to post my review later in the summer. Now that we’ve established what we’re growing, let me tell you how we get our tomatoes to go wild and produce well. First, prepare the hole by determining the depth you want to plant the tomato. Check out two ways to determine this in step two. To prevent blossom end rot and begin feeding the plant immediately, we add a calcium-rich, organic fertilizer and rabbit manure to each hole. Follow the instructions for your fertilizer and sprinkle it generously into the hole. Depending upon the size of the plant, we add ¼ to 1 cup of dried rabbit pellets. Rabbit manure is perfectly safe for immediate use. It will not burn your plants like some other livestock manures and inorganic fertilizers. The hole is now ready for the plant. We like to plant our tomatoes so that most of the initial stalk is below ground. This will allow the tomato to grow additional roots all along that stem so the plant is sturdy and develops a healthy root system. You can achieve this by removing the leaves along the stem except for the top-most cluster. Then, bury the plant deeply beneath the soil. Another way to do this is to lie the plant flat along a trench. Then curve the top so the top cluster is upward. You may need to pack the soil tightly around that upper portion to prevent the plant from flopping back to the ground. You never want tomato leaves to have backsplash from the soil when watering them. It causes disease. Don’t forget to water the plant well. We plant our veggie starts in the evening. This way, the plants have a few hours to soak up water and cozy up to their new growing space before this South Carolina heat begins to beat up on them. Other gardeners may plant early in the morning before the sun comes out. Do what works best for you. After just two weeks, these plants that were barely five inches above the soil, have stretched over a foot taller and are already at the bottom of the trellis. The lowest leaves will be trimmed to keep them away from the soil. We should be training them on the trellis next week.
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AuthorI'm a wife, mother, daughter, educator, writer and hobby farmer. Welcome to my world of simply living. Archives
December 2023
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