Planted Tomatoe seeds today

[monkeybird]

I ordered some Cherokee Purple Tomato seedlings. Can't wait to plant them.

[SCinPNW]

No worries TK. :)

MB, please post pictures of your purple tomatoes when the ripen, tht will be fun. I saw a picture of som purple tomatoes in the Baker's Creek seed catalog.

SC

[Climber]

So glad there are gardeners here. I have my maters and peppers out for three weeks now. Bought plants this year, I normally start my own. I have potato plants about 6" tall now. Planted 40# this year. All reds. Planting first run of corn, peas and butterbeans next weekend. Squash, cucumbers and okra to follow.

My garden is 110x150.

Have fun!

Jimmy

[trkarl]

No worries TK. :)

MB, please post pictures of your purple tomatoes when the ripen, tht will be fun. I saw a picture of som purple tomatoes in the Baker's Creek seed catalog.

SC

Check my archive in my blog .... 01-08-2012 update. I grew the Cherokee Purple toms for the first time and I have one and a sliced one in the pics. They are really good.
Linky but sometimes it doesn't work for some reason

http://greenerground.blogspot.com/2012_01_08_archive.html

[monkeybird]

Tim, any tips of growing them. Yours look wonderful.

[SCinPNW]

Climber, your garden sounds great! Mine is just small, but I a hoping I can expand it a little more this year. LOL, we definitely could not survive off of my garden, but I am working on it.

TK, those are some gorgeous looking tomatoes, as well as all of your other garden pics! Thanks for sharing. I will try to share pictures of my garden when I get it going.

SC

[trkarl]

Tim, any tips of growing them. Yours look wonderful.

I would say to make sure they have plenty of room unless you plan on thinning a lot of the shoots. They are indeterminate I believe. I tend to end up planting things too close together and then end up with a mess. If you start having problems with disease I found that Serenade works wonders. I used to use copper fungicide and sulfur fungicide with limited results but the Serenade worked extremely well on my tomatoes last year. I was really impressed.

http://www.serenadegarden.com/

[Climber]

Climber, your garden sounds great! Mine is just small, but I a hoping I can expand it a little more this year. LOL, we definitely could not survive off of my garden, but I am working on it.

TK, those are some gorgeous looking tomatoes, as well as all of your other garden pics! Thanks for sharing. I will try to share pictures of my garden when I get it going.

SC

Heck sounds like it's pretty good size if you planted 144 tomatoe plants !!! At some point I'll try to post some pics. Me and camera/computer interfaces don't do too well. Sometimes I get lucky, though.

Do you can your veggies? I love canning for some reason or another. Mom always did a lot and I just kinda fell in too.... Put up 100 pints of tomatoes last year, along with froze nearly 40 quarts. I'm moving away from freezing for obvious reasons. Looking forward to this growing year.

Have fun.

Jimmy

[kappydell]

I have great success starting plants under flourescent shop lights. They are a cheap set up if you do not have sunny windows. I found the plants came up stockier and sturdier under the grow lights, as they get leggy early competing for natural sun. My set up worked like this: Set up a shop light and shelf that you can adjust the light distance as the plants grow. I used a large shelf unit with a grid type shelf on it, and tied the shop light up with either its own chain or strings (whatever it took to make it fit), under the shelf (that way I could use one light per shelf and have lots of pots). Or, if you can't rig a way to adjust the light, just put the pot trays on something to hold them up high enough to stay 2 inches from the lights. I used that method when I started out and had a light I could not adjust the height on easily.

Start out planting pots (I used 3 oz dixie cups of starter mix, but put drainage holes in the dixie cups, then the cups go in a waterproof tray). Set them 2 inches below the light. Check and water daily with a spray bottle (to simulate rain and causes less shifting of seeds to the edges of the cups). As they grow, either raise the lights or lower the pots. When the 2nd set of leaves appear, transplant those that like transplanting (tomatoes, cabbage family plants, peppers, eggplant) but leave those that do NOT like to be moved in their original pots. Rearrange the trays as needed to keep them growing straight up (they will lean a little, moving them around daily worked to straighten them out).

I found starting my plants in a cooler room produced stockier and stronger plants. So I looked up minimum germination temps and adjusted the heat accordingly. My best starts grew in an unheated (register stayed closed) spare bedroom in a city apartment. I had to rotate the trays of pots every 12 hours because I had twice as many trays as would fit under the lights. It worked great.

Be sure to harden your plants off adequately when you are getting ready to plant or the shock will kill them. Using the lights I grew nicer plants than the local garden center and wal mart were selling - sturdier and bushier.

Good luck - making your own is the only way to go both for cost savings, and you can give away/sell the extras as desired. I paid for my equipment and seeds with the extras one year, now my set up down to the cost of replacement bulbs as needed.

[SCinPNW]

Actually, my 144 tomato plants are currently in the house and not in the garden as it is still too cold to put them outside. They will not be going outside until sometime in April and then I will be giving lots of the plants away to family, friends and neighbors but still keeping a fair amount for us. The tomato plants that I keep will be going into pots. Currently, my garden is three 4X4 raised beds. LOL, it is okay, you can laugh. I am actually thinkling of adding two 4X12 boxes as well. What I do not plant in the actual garden boxes will be mixed in with our ornamental plants and such. We live in a neighborhood where many of the neighbors do not have enough to do therefore, they then direct their energy to complaining about how things look or do not look in the neighborhood. Hence the reason that we hope to some day move out of this neighborhood and onto a larger piece of acreage that we can turn into a homestead. Until then I do what I can.

And if you are wondering why I planted so many tomato plants, well I look at this year of gardening as a time of learning and experimentation, and just having fun with it. :)

Canning is something I want to get into. I did it as a kid when helping my mother, but have not done it since. My mother still cans the best apple sauce in the World. She will only use Gravenstein apples, and let me tell you they are devine. The other thing I want to get into is dehydrating foods. I do not have a food dehydrator as of yet, but I am hoping to get an Excalibur this year.

SC

[SCinPNW]

Kappydell, that is great information, thank you for sharing it. Currently I have my tea plants under a grow light sitting on the kitchen counter and they seem very happy there. My tomato plants are in a different room although this room gets a lot of light, we really have not had a lot of sunny days here in Western Washington, hence my tomato plants are a little leggy. I originally planted my tomato seeds into peat pellets and then once they were up I transplanted them into 16 oz. drink cups with holes and/or peat pots. Basically whatever I had. The tomato plants are looking better, but some are still a little leggy. Your setup definitely sounds better.

I still have not planted my onions and need to get on that this week.

Thanks again for describing your setup. I will have to look into doing something like that.

Take care,
SC

[Climber]

Actually, my 144 tomato plants are currently in the house and not in the garden as it is still too cold to put them outside. They will not be going outside until sometime in April and then I will be giving lots of the plants away to family, friends and neighbors but still keeping a fair amount for us. The tomato plants that I keep will be going into pots. Currently, my garden is three 4X4 raised beds. LOL, it is okay, you can laugh. I am actually thinkling of adding two 4X12 boxes as well. What I do not plant in the actual garden boxes will be mixed in with our ornamental plants and such. We live in a neighborhood where many of the neighbors do not have enough to do therefore, they then direct their energy to complaining about how things look or do not look in the neighborhood. Hence the reason that we hope to some day move out of this neighborhood and onto a larger piece of acreage that we can turn into a homestead. Until then I do what I can.

And if you are wondering why I planted so many tomato plants, well I look at this year of gardening as a time of learning and experimentation, and just having fun with it. :)

Canning is something I want to get into. I did it as a kid when helping my mother, but have not done it since. My mother still cans the best apple sauce in the World. She will only use Gravenstein apples, and let me tell you they are devine. The other thing I want to get into is dehydrating foods. I do not have a food dehydrator as of yet, but I am hoping to get an Excalibur this year.

SC

Shoot ain't nothing wrong with small raised beds and SF boxes. I used them for years and wonder sometimes should I go back to them....:p I found 4x10 boxes made from 2x10s worked very well. You can grow a bunch of veggies using those methods. Good luck this year.

Have fun.

Jimmy

[Matt In Oklahoma]

Got my tomatoes in the ground today 1/2 hybrid and 1/2 heirloom sure hope the summer aint like last year here. Planted the rest of my stuff today as well.

[SCinPNW]

It has been quite awhile since I have updated my tomato thread. My tomatoes are coming along nicely, but it has been a challenge and I still have a ways to go since our weather is very unpredictable here when it comes to sun. Since I moved the tomatoes outside we have had a ton of rain, in fact, I think it rained all of June or at least 98% of it. ;) My big challenge has been to keep the rain off of the tomatoes. My solution was to cover each plant with garden fabric and then a white kitchen pastic garbage bag over that. Attractive they were not, however, it did work to keep the rain off of them. For the plants that I have kept on the porrch under the roof they look great! The others actually look very good as well, just a little smaller

Let me see if I can post some pictures here.

This first picture is of my Goji Berries. At one point I thought I had lost them as they were losing all of their leaves. I ended up cutting them back and hoping for the best and it seems they are going to make a come back. They really like the hot weather so it will be interesting to see if I can get them established here.


This second picture is of my tomatoes in the big pots. These are the ones I have had to keep covered during the rain. LOL, now that they are getting so big I will have to come up with another solution to cover them when it starts raining again, because it will start raining again. ;)


Another picture of the Goji berries.


And a sideways view of the tomatoes. I have two large plants up on the porch and I thought I had snapped a picture of them, but I guess not. I will try to get one tomorrow.


As for the rest of my garden, it is so-so. I am really having a battle with the slugs and I was trying to do a more organic approach in the pellets I was using to kill them but it does not seem to work. I think I will be going back to Corry's as it does work. I like to surround my garden boxes with the slug bait and it seems to work. Anyway, they ate all of my carrots, my broccoli and now most of my cabbage. They are starting in on the beets now too. Uggghhh! For awhile they were going after my Goji berries but I finally killed all of them going after the Gojis.

As for a tomato harvest, should I get something it won't be until late August or September depending on our weather.

How are your gardens doing?

SC

[qrprat77]

Well, I started out with a Good Thing, but it died.
sigh.
So I rebooted, IDK if it's too hot, but if I get my new vines to make I should have tomatoes from mid next month to freeze, and maybe beyond!
I also have some new peppers that will provide renewable MZB/Hippie deterrent

http://skattagun.blogspot.com/2012/07/july-garden-update.html

I have a GREAT! Rosemary bush though, good thing I like the stuff. I'm thinking of trying to cut and start some shoots off it, so I can have something to trade.