to tomatoes!

And now, to tomatoes!

I made most of my vegetable-planting decisions this year based on the results of last year. At my rented house in Cache Valley, there are few sunny places to plant vegetables. There is a raised garden bed in the backyard, but it's overshadowed by a tree planted smack in the center of the backyard. Last year I put potatoes back there. They did produce, but not a ton. And they fell over early on in their search for sunshine. The best place to plant is along the side of the house and the back patio, which gets a few hours of sunshine each day despite the neighbors' large pine trees to the south. Last year I planted tomatoes next to the house and squash next to the patio. The squash did well, but the tomatoes produced only a few fruits that did not mature. I can't say why except that I planted the small plants late in the season, sometime in June, I think. They were large-size and/or heirloom varieties, so they probably needed a much longer growing season. The plants grew, but not super large. Also, they may have never got enough sunlight or heat to feel up to producing.

So this year, I switched the positions of the squash and tomatoes, squash next to the house and tomatoes next to the back patio, and I bought and planted the tomatoes at the beginning of April, I think. (I can't remember the dates, and I didn't write them down!) I also protected them with standing-water cages until I thought that the danger of frost was past. They seemed to love the cages. Those cages must have provided much more heat than I thought possible, because the little plants grew in them and made blossoms. They seemed unhappy when I removed the water cages (after a warm weekend, because I thought we'd have warm weather from that point on) and they had to survive for some weeks through cool spring rain storms. But as of this evening, the plants are doing well. They have kept growing, all of them display blossoms, and two of them have little tomatoes! Here are the orange cherry tomato (top) and the early girl (bottom).

I chose different tomato varieties than last year as well. The orange cherry tomato has a "to production" time of 55 days, and the early girl is similar. The third plant is a big boy with a slightly shorter production time than some of the other large tomato varieties. With all three, I have a cherry, a medium, and a large tomato. I hope the big boy produces fruit this year, and its blossoms are hopeful signs. Although at this point, the plant isn't yet large enough to support large fruit.

In April when I planted these three plants, the roommates and I were unsure if we would live in this house through the full summer. I thought I would just plant three plants, just to see how they did. Nothing too ambitious. If we moved, it wouldn't be a big loss, and if the plants produced and we stayed, that would be lovely. I stuck to this idea of only three plants for a few weeks. But new ideas assailed me, and I gave in, with pleasure. And enthusiasm. What follows are two more tomato experiments....

In early May, I went to Valley Nursery in Ogden, Utah, in search of citrus trees. They didn't have the trees in yet. But I found seed packets with seeds for several varieties of cherry tomatoes. I have a few large basic planters, so I planted some of the seeds in one planter. I have tried to keep them moist (and to talk to them often). I placed the planter on the front porch in full view of the noon sun. Nothing happened for more than two weeks. But now, several seedlings have sprouted.

I have already thinned them out, and a few more have come up. My idea was to allow three of them to grow, and to support them against the three stakes of the tomato cage in their pot. The third "cluster" of seeds, which should be to the right, hasn't produced anything yet, so perhaps it will just be two plants instead. My idea in planting many cherry tomato seeds all in one pot is that whatever seeds sprout, perhaps those are the varieties most suited to grow in this Northern Utah climate on my front porch in a pot. And whatever don't sprout/are smallest, are less suited to grow, and I can remove them. I have no idea which varieties I'll end up with (if any plants do get big enough to produce), but if they produce, I'll find out which varieties they are. Plus, the idea of three different little cherry tomato plants growing together is just cute.

One week ago, on Saturday, Roommate 2 and I went to the Cache Valley Gardeners' Market, the local farmers market. We found quite a few wonderful things including two tomato plants, a Piedmont Pear and what I think is a Costoluto Genovese tomato. The vendor's picture of the Piedmont Pear looks like any other yellow pear tomato, but I shall see what it looks like if I get fruit. The Costoluto Genovese is an Italian heirloom, which we picked because we wanted a tomato with the deep lobes. We planted each plant in large pots, and one week later, both plants are doing well. The Costoluto is growing, or at least, it's making a lot of new little leaves (on the left). The pear (on the right) had its main stem broken off before we bought it, but it is putting out new leaves as well!

These plants are in the best location of all, in the window box on the south side of the house, with the most sun all day long. I don't know how they will do in their pots, if the soil will get too warm or not, etc, but I'm sure that the tops will like the sun, at least.

And, speaking of these planters, I tried something new with them this year. Last year I had purple potatoes in a planter on the front porch. When I emptied the pot at the end of the season, most of the dirt was smelly (growing something besides potatoes) and, I'm sure, useless and perhaps harmful to the potato's roots. So, I devised a way to keep the water flowing through the pots this year. Roommate 2 helped with the whole process. First, I tried to create drainage holes by burning the plastic with my lighter. Pyro that I am, I enjoyed this. But Roommate 2 had a much better idea—pull the bottoms right off! It turns out that these basic planters are made to do this! The bottoms go right back on if you want them to. So we pulled bottoms off of planters. The pots have four drainage holes and four bottom-attacher holes, or eight in all, making for quite a lot of drainage.

I wanted to not only have holes so that water could drain out, but to eliminate the mass of smelly soil from the interior of the pot and allow the water to flow right through the entire thing. I devised this structure.

There is a small pot in there to take up a little space and hopefully help to cool the inside, and then the pieces of cinder block should help with drainage, as any rocks in a pot will do. We put the tomato cage right down in the bottom and then put in the cinder block pieces in, reasoning that the blocks and the dirt would help hold the cage in place, and we wouldn't struggle to put a cage in later, after the plants grew bigger. After the cage, the little pot, and the cinder block pieces, we shoveled in garden dirt from the back vegetable bed, then put in the two plants, and then placed nicer potting soil around them. Soon I will fertilize them. Here are the tomatoes right after we planted them last Saturday.

Because these are heirloom varieties, they may need a longer growing season than they will get. But at least in this location they will get plenty of sun and warmth. Hopefully they will produce a few tomatoes.