Tag Archives: tomatoes

How about some snow with those tomatoes?

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In our geography you often hear that it’s safe to plant summer crops after Mother’s day. It’s snowed twice this week-after the tomatoes have been planted. And unless you’ve got some kind of protection, your tomatoes are no longer among the living.

Yesterday I delivered some tomato, kale, and lettuce plants to a customer. As I looked at his raised bed, you couldn’t help but notice the dead existing tomato plants, squash, and zucchini they had planted a couple of weeks ago during one of those early and rare 80 degree spring days. If you want to do that you can, but only if you’re prepared to cover your crops in case of a weather emergency.

These tomato plants made it through just fine with the use of an inexpensive cloche. I don’t use anything fancy but you can spend a lot of money on them if you want. I think its a good idea to have several of these handy items available for this very purpose. Its a good thing to use when you’re first putting in your transplants as well. It protects not just from the colder weather, but also from wind, which is also a bad thing for plants just starting out.

The other nifty think I like about using cheap orange juice container such as this? If night time temperatures will be getting to low, you can simple put the cap on. It’s important to take them off the next day, especially if the sun will be coming out. After 7-10 days, I’ll remove the cloche as the weather should be safe from here on out [ois skin=”3″]

Vertical gardening-a few thoughts

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In 6-7 weeks it will be time to put tomato plants and other vining crops into the garden in our location. I always like to think one season ahead. It’s spring now, but I need to keep summer in mind. As I will be putting up my vertical towers soon, I need to have the squares where those towers are placed emptied out. If I wait even as little as a week and start planting any crop that takes longer than 50 days, those squares won’t be available to put in my tomato plants.

If you’ve got short term crops to put in, such as radishes or bigger scallion starts, you might still have enough time to clear out squares in time for squashes, tomatoes, etc. I’ve tried to illustrate this by the picture. The back row is completely planted and will be ready for clearing out in about 4-5 weeks. All my vining crops will be ready for planting in time for a great summer season. This takes some advanced planning but helps to make your square foot garden as efficient as it can be.

This lesson, taught to me years ago, has had to be reinforced a few times. I started my tomato seeds inside during the first week of April. When the danger of frost had passed and the time arrived for putting tomatoes out-the 2nd or 3rd week of May, those squares still had crops in them which needed another 2-3 weeks to finish growing. I could either wait until they were done, which would really put me behind, or I had to put my vertical towers in another location which were not the best. I chose the latter but had to put up with shading in the later months.

The take home lesson? Figure out where your vertical towers will be placed and fill those squares up as early as possible for them to be cleared out in time for your vining crops[ois skin=”3″]

Bye bye tomatoes!!!

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IMG_1716The end of October and I’m about out of tomatoes. Very sad! For me it marks the end of the summer garden and I know that winter is around the corner. We’ve enjoyed more tomatoes this year than we ever have in the past. I grew 16 tomato plants using 5 different varieties. These varieties are the ones I”ll alway grow. Lots of cherry tomatoes, several Roma types, and then a standard tomato variety.

One evening I went out to find that a few of my cherry tomatoes had fallen to the ground. When that happens I know they’ve been on the vine too long and are over ripe. At that point I began pulling them off the vine-from the bottom-to put in the freezer for the winter. We enjoy delicious pasta sauce for months with these tomatoes. There’s little work and the taste-you would never know they were frozen. I simply don’t have the time(or money)to put all of these up for storage.

One thing I learned this year about all the different types of tomatoes: cherry tomatoes are definitely king! Folks enjoy the regular and paste type of tomatoes, but one mouthful of pure sugar from these cherry tomatoes make a believer out of anyone. Last week I offered a handful of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes to a neighbor. “I’m not a tomato fan but our son is-I’ll give them to him.” She then tasted one to make sure she didn’t like them: “Oh my! I’ve never tasted a tomato like this! What kind are these? It’s like a mini-sugar explosion in your mouth!” I think she’ll take all she can get next year.

Last point-don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t grow tomatoes in 1 square foot! I think it’s the only way to do it. [ois skin=”1″]

Square foot gardening-the cloche

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tomato clocheI’ve always enjoyed growing tomato varieties that are difficult to buy locally. Because of that I order all my tomato seeds from various seed catalogs. This particular tomato is a “sun-sugar” and it’s very sweet. Like one of my customers said: “it tastes like grapes with a slight tomato flavor!” They have been transplanted once into bigger pot makers a week ago.

But we all want to be the first person in the neighborhood to harvest tomatoes. Some folks go out and buy large tomato plants that already have the yellow blossoms on them thinking they are closer to their summer dream. And that’s all it is-a dream. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, it’s very hard to have tomatoes by the end of June in zone 6. Look around at your neighbors and you’ll find that everyone starts getting tomatoes at about the same time. Still, I planted this outside today with temperatures in the low 70’s. But the night temperatures are still a bit cool-mid 40’s with one night predicted to be 39. I could just wait for a week but I don’t want to-I thought I might try an experiment. I’ve got a lot of extra plants growing inside in case it doesn’t work.

In the square foot gardening system we teach “recycle, reduce, reuse.” Don’t throw things away. I cut the bottom off a plastic orange juice bottle to be placed over the plant to act as a cloche. By removing the cap I can prevent the inside temperature from getting to warm. The other advantage of this is we had some stronger winds today. Not only does it protect against cold but also the wind-which is especially damaging to new plants. By late afternoon I put the cap on-trapping the heat of the day inside the container for some of those cooler evening temperatures. I’ll remove the cap first thing in the morning and let it warm up. In a future post I’ll share what other things I do with this kind of bottle.

For those who may not know, I also have a Facebook page under the same name as this blog. I hope you can visit-I post different things than I do here and I’m actually more active on that than I am on the blog. I try hard to put the daily happenings of my square foot garden on Facebook while spending time on some of the more specifics with the blog. My hope is that you can visit both as they augment each other nicely[ois skin=”1″]

Much planted, much to go

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51914 gardenAfter tomorrow I’ll have a lot of newly emptied squares. To date I have a lot of the summer crops in and growing. Tomatoes, cucumbers, summer lettuce varieties, chives, carrots, chard, scallions, potatoes, nasturtium, peppers, basil, and bush beans are all in. In the next day I’ll finish planting all the rest-zucchini, patty pan and banana/butternut squash, beets, scallions, and maybe some thyme. I’ll continue to plant lettuce all summer long to make sure I have a large enough harvest by the time the tomatoes ripen. If you’re looking for a nifty little gadget to tell you what to plant and when, you ought to check this out. It’s free and easy to use. You’ll get an email periodically to remind you what to plant next. Read about it here.  Hope this helps out.

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