Tomato Madness

[cranefly]

My backyard garden tomato harvest has been very disappointing the past several years, and I'm fed up with it. So this year I'm going all out.
At the start of February I planted some tomato seeds, and since I'm a tomato snob, that means heirloom indeterminates, with an emphasis on black or dark tomatoes. These are the varieties:

Amish Paste
Cherokee Purple
Black Krim
Southern Night
Hillbilly Potato Leaf
Amana Orange

Now I'm having to transplant some of them into 6.5 inch plastic pots, which creates a problem. I need lots of pots, and the garden centers and Orchard are charging a buck each. That's really not much, but I need lots of pots.

Just today I transplanted ten more tomato plants, which brings me up to 26 plants in 6.5 inch pots. I just checked my seedling tray, and there's 49 more seedlings coming up. I didn't mean to plant that many, but half of them hadn't germinated after a couple weeks, so I planted more seeds -- only to have old and new seeds germinate together. Let's see. 49 plus 26 is 75. That's a good round number, considering I only intend to put 7 or 8 plants in my garden. I could just let the other seedlings die. I really could. But I can't. Don't know why.

So I need 49 more 6.5 inch pots, but I really don't want to spend 49 bucks on them. So earlier today I checked online. Sure enough, I can get them for 15 cents each on the web. I just need to buy a minimum of 800 of them.

All of which calls for a bit of an "alas."

Did I mention the mail coming today? There wasn't much. Mostly stuff for Lady Cranefly. But I did get a mailer for The International Heirloom Exposition. They're asking for support to fight GMO (genetically modified organisms) in our food chain. Out of generosity they included a packet of seeds.

Tomato seeds.

The variety is San Marzano. I looked it up on the web, and they are regarded by many chefs as the best sauce tomatoes in the world.

So I just planted nine of them.

[El Dingo]

That reminds me of the Pumpkin vine I planted last year. I picked it up at a nursery on a whim and planted it last May. It grew to about 10' and gave me one pumpkin (a very nice one though). So I harvested the pumpkin at the beginning of October and made and set it on the porch as a Fall decoration.

Then the vine started growing again. It reached 40' and had about 10 tiny pumpkins before I decided nothing was going to ripen in December and had to cut it down.

I'm going to start earlier this year. Pumpkins are awesome.

[cranefly]

I've transplanted all 75 seedlings from flats into 75 1-gallon containers. They've all been remarkably healthy, even the scrawny ones are getting buff.
But yesterday my "no tomato seedling left behind" campaign came crashing to Earth.
Not certain what did it. Maybe a bird, or possibly a squirrel. But something broke the main stem on one of them.
I buried it in the compost heap and spent yesterday in mourning.

This morning it felt good to once more put on my orange and purple polka-dot ensemble.

[Drunk Monk]

S planted cherry tomatoes in one of the raised bins I built a few years ago. Those tomatoes starting sprouting everywhere, all about the yard and from the compost. Turns out the Pom likes them and seems to be in charge of the spread of cherry tomatoes in our yard. That's right. He's a cherry-tom-pom.

There was a magnificent artichoke plant in that same bin. One year, the harvest was so ample that we couldn't keep up (and the entire family loves chokes, except maybe the pom). Last year, those cherry tomatoes overtook the artichoke bin. That's right. Cherry-tom-choked-out-chokes.

We'll see what this year brings.

[Drunk Monk]

I ate the first Black Krim from cf's gifted plants last night. That was one damn tasty 'mato, so tasty that i ate it straight, no chaser. Looks like there are plenty more on the way.

Thanks cf!

[El Dingo]

Well my planting went downhill fast. My first batch of peas were nibbled to stems days after sprouting. My radishes were dug up (but not eaten). My pumpkin was similarly dug around but not touched. It seems squirrels love to dig in gardens, not to eat but to store extra food and mess up your roots.

I moved the pumpkin to a pot and gave up on the radishes and peas. Hopefully I can save on a $3.99 pumpkin with my pack of $2.99 seeds this year.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

I gave my friend my airsoft H&K MP-5 to pick off the squirrels that were terrorizing her garden. Squirrel activity's waaaaay down, garden is producing nicely.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

I know that gun . . .

[Drunk Monk]

...but they never seem to make it to the raised beds. The beds are 3 ft up with additional chicken wire to keep the cat from pooping in them. Plus there's our guard pom, who defends the yard against squirrels and skunks. We have a lot of fruit trees and a nut tree so the squirrels get more than their fill and are way too lazy to go for the veggies.

[cranefly]

I thought we would have early tomatoes. The early spring was so warm, and it allowed lots of blossoms to set. But then the rest of spring was so cool that the tomato plants went into a WTF state. Finally they're starting to wake up again. Here's a photo of how loaded the plants are:


We did finally get some ripe ones. The black krim aren't quite ready. But we got some southern nights, which look (and likely taste) like black krim. Here's a photo of them.


The squash plants are going crazy, but they almost always do. We just tried squash blossoms. Pretty good, though I doubt they're that healthy fried with flour and egg.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

That's right. I edited Cranfly's post to show the pictures here. Let Tyranny reign.

[Drunk Monk]

Got two over the weekend. They looked and tasted lot like that Black Krim, only the skin was a little tougher. I chopped them up and added them to some tacos.

We got two monster pumpkins on the vine. One crawled out of our raised bin and is getting plump next to the compost bin. The other is still cradled in the bin, slowly hogging up more and more space.

[cranefly]

So.
Uh.
If any of you happen to be in the area, feel free to stop by.
Really.

Today's Haul:

[Drunk Monk]

Our cherry tomatos have choked out the heirlooms so their production is low. Some of the southern nights have come in; they are like eggplant shaped cherries. The black krims are doing the best, but we haven't had that huge a haul, thankfully.

[cranefly]

Well, it's mid-Feb, and I was meaning to have tomato seedlings by now.  But it's hard to do that if you don't plant the seeds.

So I've been a bit frustrated, not getting the jump on things.  But the thing is, we're still getting tomatoes.  Sort of.

There was no completely killing frost this winter.  Most of the tomato plants got killed, but with remnants surviving.



Then I got to thinking.  Can indeterminate tomato plants overwinter?  I don't know.  I didn't find anything on the web about that.  But I did stumble upon articles about starting tomato plants from shoots.  Now, normally that wouldn't interest me.  Who wants to try to keep tomato plant shoots alive indoors through the whole winter?  But this has been a strange winter, and now that I want to start tomato plants, I have some green tomato vines from last year still in the garden.  So...  Why not give it a try?

Wish me luck.
--cranefly