Six More Seedlings With Growing Tomatoes

Late last week my wife bought two leggy SunGold tomato seedlings. I started working on one hole Saturday afternoon and continued on Saturday evening. This hole was in an area where we have not planted before. I didn't really dig a hole. It was more like scraping out a hole.

My wife completed watering the front yard tomatoes on Sunday. She also clipped some low hanging branches in the "koi pond" and those plants look a lot better for having been trimmed.

I have been training the plants nearly every day.

This morning I discovered that Blue Beauty, Indigo Rose, Ananas Noire, Nyagous, Garden Peach and Speckled Roman(2) have growing tomatoes. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Tomato Plants Growing Strong

Sorry I haven't posted in quite a while.

The plants are growing strongly. My wife was training the tomatoes last week, though I did get around to training the plants on Sunday.

The front yard is being raided by the neighbor's rabbits. So far they have left the tomato plants (mostly) alone but I doubt that detente will continue when the fruit matures.

Saturday and Sunday were very hot for May. Saturday's high: 103.0. Sunday's high, 102.6. Blistering. This will sterilize a lot of the blooms on the plants. But strangely, this heat wave was so soon that most of the plants do not have a lot of blooms.

Sunday morning my wife and I quickly watered the plants -- my wife did the front yard and the "south garden" and I did the back yard not including the "south garden" -- before the blistering heat set in.

About half the plants in the front yard have tomatoes. Shah/Mikado has tomatoes in the backyard "south garden".

I'll make a list later, but for now the planted tomatoes are growing and looking good. 

Planted Two More Seedlings in Containers

I finally got around to checking out the planted tomatoes and did some minor training. Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red(1) and Black and Brown Boar had multiple tomatoes and looked strong. Interestingly, the plants in the south section of the "koi pond" looked better than the plants in the north end. The southern plants were planted earlier than the ones in the northern end but I don't think that would explain all of it. Last year the southern plants struggled while the northern plants flourished.

The last two tomato seedlings planted in the ground were caged by my wife a few days ago. Also, she has been watering the seedlings.

Yesterday evening we moved the two Husky Red containers behind the wire fence that contains all the raised beds. We planted SuperSweet 100 and Isis Candy in the remaining two containers and put those behind the fence as well. All four containers were propped on bricks and put into an unused cinder block raised bed.

That'll probably be it for our 2013 planting. 

Three More Seedlings Planted During Cutworm Paradise

Tomato-wise, it was a quiet work week. On Friday my wife watered the front yard tomato plants and the plants in the "south garden". Also, she put cages on the plants on the "koi pond".

On Sunday she watered the rest of the back yard tomato plants. We should be watering more often but what can I say? We're busy with life. It's all good. The tomato plants are doing quite well, thank you.

We did plant three containers Sunday evening. The seedlings planted were Juliet, Sweet 100 and Rosella Purple.

My wife insisted that the soil preparation be done on the patio. That was different. I probably asked four times to make sure that's what she wanted.

"Yes, dump the soil on the patio."

"You realize that's on concrete. That'll be harder to clean up."

"Yes, of course. We're going to redo the pots using the same dirt, We'll add a lot of potting soil and planter mix. What we won't do is mix it with other garden dirt. That way we won't bring in any diseases and other unwanted items from our soil into the containers."

Ah, the light goes on.

The first two pots were handled as expected. The dirt in the third pot, however, was noticeably drier than the first two. That in and of itself didn't mean anything. When I dumped the dirt onto the patio I noticed moist soil at the bottom and adult cutworms. I found more just by turning the dirt with the added amendments.

So my wife used a hand shovel to go through the soil before placing it into the container. I'd scoop a pile, place in front of her and she'd sift it. Laborious, but effective. And yes, we found more cutworms. We found 26 adult sized cutworms in the dirt before we had filled the container. There was more dirt remaining on the patio but we had no more light. But that's not a misprint. 26 adult cutworms (and probably more) were in one container. Bleah!

I suspect this container doesn't drain as well as the other two. Maybe that's why the other two containers just had soil while the this container was a cutworm paradise. 

Planted Four More Seedlings Tonight

Tonight I dug two more holes in the back yard. My wife planted Green Grape and Kellogg's Breakfast in these holes.

The rest of the planting will be done in containers and perhaps the redwood raised bed.

But before I dug, my wife had planted two Husky Red tomatoes in said containers. I'll need to check the tags but these appear to be different than Husky Cherry Red. 

I Got Some Camera Time At Descanso Gardens...

Here's a YouTube link to Kaye Kittrell's "Late Bloomer at TomatoMania!" where I get some camera time at Descanso Gardens.

Enjoy! 

4/20 Iris Show was a success; Planted 3 More Seedlings

I dug two holes in the backyard on Monday night. By Thursday morning, however, we hadn't put seedlings into these holes.

Catching up on other items...my wife watered the front yard tomatoes on Sunday and the "south garden" tomatoes on Monday.

The planted seedlings are doing just fine. However the "south garden" tomatoes are particularly thriving. My wife planted all grafted tomatoes in this area. They are doing really, really well so far.

--

And as you've noticed, I've posted this on Sunday night. Some things happened between now and then...

All the seedlings got watered on Friday. And on Friday evening I turned the dirt in the redwood raised bed. Also, we planted two more seedlings, Indigo Rose and Japanese Black Trifele.

But my wife had been prepping for the San Fernando Valley Iris Society tour of our house on 4/20. She had been prepping feverishly for days on end, dead heading roses, clearing out the area just east of the south gate, planting strawberries, you name it. It's been a frenzy for several days.

Finally, the big day, Saturday. My wife surprised me by planting Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red(2) in the redwood raised bed. We moved some pots in the morning but a vast majority of the work was already done.

The first person showed up around noon, the last around 4PM, about 25 people in all. We suspect there would have been more if it wasn't so hot that day. But nonetheless it was a rousing success. Everyone was impressed with the garden in both the front and back yards. My wife thinks people talked about tomato seedlings more than irises, but I disagree. To a person, everyone was impressed.

Sunday was mostly a rest day for both of us. My wife was decompressing from Saturday's event and I've been battling something for several weeks. My wife thinks it's allergies. That's as good an explanation as anything out there.