Everything Looks Good...

The four outdoor tomato plants are all a deep green, no problems with the transition into the ground.

Many of the seedlings are getting a second set of leaves.

All systems go!

Seedlings!

Here's a picture of our seedlings, taken by my wife last night. They look great!

Get to Work, Little Guys!

The last thing I did before going to bed was to sprinkle the two boxes of worms over the rototilled back yard area.

Go to work, guys!

The Flag Has Dropped!

It's been a busy weekend....

On Saturday morning my wife and I went to the “Tomato Temptations” class at Cal State Northridge. The teacher was Scott Daigre, the operator of the TomatoMania web site. As always, Scott was both entertaining and informative.

After speaking with Scott after the event, my wife and I went to a birthday party for the son of our “seed lady”. The event started at ten in the morning so we missed most of the party. But we did catch the last hour or so, in time for the cake to be cut and the birthday boy to receive his present.

On the way home we picked up a crape myrtle given from a friend's house.

We went home and I began to catch up on things. The crape myrtle was planted in the front parkway. After about 45 minutes, our neighbor came by with the rented rototiller. (Oh yeah, he was going to rent one this weekend!). He was done with it and Bill, feel free to use it for about another 90 minutes, when I have to return it.

So I started it up in the back yard and let her rip...and more or less I was ice skating with it. The rototiller was skimming the surface dirt. A pin fell out with held another pin in place, which left the depth bar loose. This became a problem so my wife called the neighbor.

He came over with his two children. My wife watched the two children while we worked the back yard. We found the missing pin and reset everything. Based on his suggestion, we made it a two man job – one to break the soil and the other to run the rototiller. It worked beautifully! We alternated – one breaking the dirt in front and the other rototilling. Without his help we would never have finished in time.

After such an active day, my wife and I zombied in front of the TV for the evening.

Sunday morning we went out for breakfast and visited Green Thumb. We bought four tomato plants: Sweet 100, Sweet Olive, Cherokee Purple and Patio. Also, we bought three bags of planter mix, worms and worm castings.

I needed to do some work for my consulting clients, so my wife worked out while I did computer work. After she came back, she planted Cherokee Purple in the front yard and cleaned up the brick border surrounding the “koi pond”.

At that point I needed a break so I helped my wife plant the other three tomato plants in back yard containers. Also, I distributed the worm castings over the recently rototilled back yard. I started the internal tomato documentation.

My wife has just informed me that we have 95 seedlings growing. She's the new “seed lady”!

So there you go! I was sort of planning to rototill the back yard but didn't expect it to really happen. It did. There was no plan to buy tomato plants, but we bought four of them and they're already planted.

The flag has dropped and the race is on!