Thursday, May 23, 2013

Three More Seedlings With Growing Tomatoes

My wife completed the back yard tomato watering yesterday.

This morning I noted three more seedlings with growing tomatoes: Piement, Jaune Flamme and Husky Red(1).

We need to add soil to the two Husky Red containers. That's on our to-do list.

Another thing on my to-do list is to cut away the branches whose leaves are hitting the dirt.
 

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

All Front Yard Seedlings Have Growing Tomatoes

I did some light tomato training early this morning. While training I noticed that Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Black Seaman and the potentially problematic Paul Robeson had growing tomatoes.

Now every front yard seedling has growing tomatoes.

In the back yard I noticed that SuperSweet 100 had growing tomatoes.

My wife has been deep watering the back yard tomato plants as her time permits.
 

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Preparing The On-Line Tomato Spreadsheet

My wife watered some of the back yard tomatoes yesterday during another hot day -- it got up to 94.7 degrees at Pierce College nearby.

I've been training the tomatoes the past two mornings as well as putting together the on line tomato harvest spreadsheet for 2013. I think I have it ready to go. If you're interested in seeing the numbers, post your email as a comment to this post and I'll be sure to include you.

While putting things together, here's what I've noticed:

It appears we did not plant SunGold this year. Both my wife and I are really surprised by this, but there's no record of it this blog for this year nor in my documentation. We both think we had a SunGold plant but perhaps we gave it away at some point. Or the unknown plant that we're guessing is Orange Paruche is really SunGold. Or more likely, we don't have it. No volunteers have come up yet. My wife may go out and grab one if we can still find it.

We planted a tomato plant named Grande in the back yard that was not recorded in my blog. This was the second of two French tomatoes handed to us by a TomatoMania volunteer. For the spreadsheet I guessed at the planting date based on what was planted around it.

All the plants in the "corner office" have growing tomatoes.

All but three plants in the "koi pond" have tomatoes. The three that do not are Paul Robeson, Black Seaman and Dr. Wyche's Yellow. Only Paul Robeson is concerning me. The concern is that I have had poor luck with this tomato plant the last several years. I'm beginning to think the line is "polluted" somehow but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The plant seems fine for now, just no tomatoes.

Four out of six plants in the south garden (in the back yard) have tomatoes. All six of these plants are grafts. As a group they look stronger and are a bit larger in size than the other plants. The ones missing tomatoes are Jersey Giant and Gold Medal. No concerns here, they look great.

In the main back yard area only Snow White and Green Zebra have tomatoes. This area was planted later than the rest, so no issues here.

Among the container plants Sweet 100 has growing tomatoes.

My guess is that we'll do about 5000 harvested tomatoes for 2013. Unofficially we planted 53 tomato plants this year, down significantly from last year. I'm also troubled by the early hot spells we've been having so far.