Strung Out

Today we began phase two of our tomato trellis project. This involved training the tomatoes up pieces of string so that they grow nice and tall and also look cool. As an added bonus, these tomatoes will not make you puke your guts out, though that has less to do with our trellis than it does with the fact that we don't water our garden with sewerage.

Anyway, to get our trellis in working order we first cut pieces of string slightly longer than the height of the trellis and tied little loops at one end. Then, we threw them up and over the top bar of the trellis so we could make a good, tight slipknot.

Here's Kelly throwing the string into place. He was making a weird face in the photo so I cropped that out and left his disembodied hand.


Here's the resulting trusty slipknot.


When the strings were hung above each tomato plant, we tied the end of the string loosely around the stem of each plant and twisted it up a bit, so the tomatoes were supported by the string.


I was too busy playing with string to take many illustrative photos, but if you'd like some more detail about this method of supporting tomatoes I highly recommend this entertaining video from Hanna of This Garden Is Illegal.

In about two months,

picture this

but with tomatoes.

Companion Planting and a Flashy New Trellis

The tomatoes are in. The bed in the photo is 4' by 18'. There are eight tomato plants (a little less than half our stock) in the bed, which I know isn't very many, but they will be sharing the space with four varieties of poling beans, red onions, leeks, and a shit load of basil. Well, maybe not a shit load, but a fare amount none the less.

We're really happy with how well our new trellis turned out. The design is mostly from something Meg found on the internet and in the latest issue of Organic Gardening. However, the modifications are all Future House. It did take us a few hours to build, but it's nothing more than bamboo from our property and salvaged string (the whole thing didn't cost a cent). I'm certain that by the end of this year I'll be able to tie knots like a sailor (which is fitting, because I tend to curse like one).

Sleepover Party!

We've been hardening off our tomatoes and tonight they're spending the night outdoors, under the row cover with the Brussels sprouts and purple cabbage. They'll be in the ground by the end of the week, and then we can officially begin the long wait for a ripe tomato.

Calcium Boost

We have just about one more month until the tomatoes go in the ground (though with the 85° temp we hit today, maybe we should bump our target date up a little). Our seedlings were started a few weeks ago and there's no way they'd comfortably make it four more weeks in their little six-packs. So, today was re-potting day. I upgraded the largest of the seedlings to slightly bigger containers using the Future House Farm Surefire Method for Wicked Hardy Tomato Plants.*

First, I made myself an enormous omelet.

Kidding! I actually took a bunch of eggshells we'd been saving and smashed them in to wee little bits.

And mixed them into a bucket of potting soil.

The eggshells are because tomatoes need to have a lot of calcium available so that they can regulate their water intake, or something like that. Last year our tomatoes and our peppers seemed to like having some eggshells, so we figured we'd try that trick again this year.

The real key thing to re-potting tomatoes, though, is to bury them deep. All those little hairs on their stems can develop into roots, so we pull off the first leaves towards the bottom and stick them way down deep in their new pots.

That way, only the top couple of leaves will stick out and the buried stem will grow new roots.

Tomatoes are really affected by water fluctuations, so both the extra calcium and the really deep roots help a lot. Every time we replant the tomatoes, whether in new pots or out in the garden, we bury them at least halfway. They always look a bit pathetic afterwards, but being able to access so much extra water makes them grow like crazy soon after they settle into their new home.



*I just made that up. Our tomato plants were actually killed by a black walnut tree last year.

Game On!

The first tomato seeds sprouted yesterday. I don't know what it is, but there is something about tomatoes from the garden that makes it feel official. We're going to give twelve varieties a go this year. This is our first year growing yellow tomatoes and last night we were talking about how cool it's going to be making yellow sauce and soup.

Beaver Blogging: Grandpa's German Tomatoes

Meg and I are carrying on a bit of history in our garden. Many years ago my grandfather received some tomato seeds from a neighbor of his and has been growing them ever since. His neighbor said they were German tomatoes and had little information on them beyond that. Last year my grandfather gave us some of those seeds.

We unfortunately never took any pictures of the plants we grew this year,but we'll be sure to next year. The photo on the left is one my grandfather took of a plant from two years ago. They are big and man do they produce.

The tomatoes are real meaty and only have one vein of seeds. They're great for slicing and stewing.

The top photo is one Meg took today in my grandfather's living room. I'm on the left and my brother Derrek is on the right. For those of you who are wondering whether the photo is bad or my grandfather is drunk, let me point out the empty glass in his right hand. The old gardener was feeling good to see his grand kids.

This Is Kelly's Hand Modeling Portfolio

Incidentally, it's also the troupe of heirloom tomatoes that provided the seeds for most of next year's tomato crop.

Since we expanded the garden at the beginning of this year and realized that we have a lot more space than we thought we did, we decided that next year we'll squeeze in as many different tomatoes as possible. We bought the above 'maters at the farmers' market in October, and diligently saved the seeds before devouring the tomatoes. We're not really sure what they are, aside from the fact that they're heirlooms and they're organic. They'll join our Brandywines and German tomatoes, plus an unpictured gigantic yellow thing that we also picked up at the farmers' market.

What Not To Compost

Meg shared with me an interesting fact the other day. She said that tomato plants are susceptible to somewhere around 10,000 different diseases. How accurate that number is, I couldn't say, but this doesn't detract from the fact that your tomatoes should be treated like the boy in the bubble. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but I'm not kidding you when I say that the slightest thing to go askew could spell disaster for your plants.

Since the tomato plants can potentially harbor some nasty little nasties even after they are uprooted, it is highly suggested that you do not try to compost them (translation: don't even effing think about it). So, for those of us who are lucky enough to have the space to plant more than a few tomato plants, this may lead to some questions as to what should be done with the mountain of dead plants come fall. From what we've read, there are two simple solutions: one is to bag them up and send them to the curb



and two is to torch them. As you can see we are leaning heavily towards option two, because, well, it's fire and fire's cool.