This morning I only spent a few minutes on the rock left by last night's digging. No luck.
My wife was too busy to plant or prepare any tomatoes. So when I got home from work I continued working trying to get the rock out.
As you'll see I was unsuccessful.
You can see the shovel next to the rock or concrete structure that I simply could not remove. To the right is a one gallon container filled with rocks and asphalt. Laid out in front of the one gallon container are several asphalt pieces that couldn't fit into the container. On one hand it's good to get the rocks and asphalt out of the ground. But it's a pyrrhic victory. The area where this dreck was removed isn't much of a plantable area.
Here's a closeup of the rock:
We planted Kentucky Beefsteak just west of the rock and called it a night.
Yesterday afternoon my wife planted Paul Robeson, Black Seaman, Berkeley Tie Dye, Brad's Black Heart, Dr. Wyche's Yellow and Speckled Roman in the front yard "koi pond". I assisted with the last couple of holes but my wife did a vast majority of the work.
In theory our front yard is now finished, though we may add one more in a shaded area of the "corner office".
Tonight I started my first hole in the back yard. I pulled out enough rocks and stuff (there was at least one shard of glass) to fill a one gallon container. But there was a huge rock to the east of the hole that I simply could not get out of the hole. I'll try again in the morning before I head out to work. I hope the soil around the rock dries out and I can dislodge it. If I can't get it out my wife will plant something just to the west of this rock.
On Friday my wife planted four more grafted tomatoes in the south garden -- Missouri Pink Love Apple, Michael Pollan, Gold Medal and Black & Brown Boar. She caged all the grafts with our homemade cages from last year. Also she added two layers of green ribbon twine across the bottom two holes of the cages to keep our dogs away from the seedlings.
In the evening I planted Vorlon, Black Krim, Black Cherry and Pineapple in the front yard "koi pond". My wife did help out toward the end of that planting, making sure we finished before the sun set.
On Saturday I helped out with the Descanso Gardens TomatoMania event. The Descanso Gardens location gets more popular and this year kept to that tradition. It was extremely busy in the early morning followed by a pretty steady pace throughout the day.
The tomato seedlings are kept on foldaway tables as opposed to being placed on the ground. I seem to be the designated person moving the stock forward and let me tell you, it's much easier on tables. I interacted with the customers a lot more than I did at the Encino location because I was (somewhat) less fatigured and there was simply less stock to manage. Keeping up at the main event in Encino this year was hopeless, but I did catch up with things at Descanso Gardens just before closing time.
We met some friends for dinner in the area and that was a lot of fun. I didn't get home until around 8:30 PM.
On Sunday I was back at Descanso Gardens. Our original plans were to have my wife working on Sunday but she changed her mind. So I worked it. It was a slower pace but by no means slow. Again, I got to talk with the customers more.
When I left for the day there were approximately 80 tomatoes remaining. From what I'm told, the Descanso Gardens event started with 370 flats (usually there's 16 seedlings per flat but a few had 25 per flat), or roughly 6000 seedlings. A successful event!
During the day my wife watered the planted tomatoes in the "corner office".
I check the planted tomatoes this morning and the plants were doing just fine!
No tomatoes planted Wednesday.
On Thursday my wife planted two tomatoes and prepared holes for three others in the "south garden" in the backyard. This area is a small strip of dirt running along the back yard fence to the south. The two planted tomatoes are Shah/Mikado and Jersey Giant. Both planted tomatoes are grafts. My wife plans to plant grafted tomatoes along the south wall.
I watered the planted front yard tomatoes this morning.
No tomatoes planted on Monday evening. I had to go to a board meeting for our computer user group.
Yesterday I planted Stupice in the "corner office", our sixth tomato seedling in that area. There is room for one more. We planted Kelllogg's Breakfast in that spot last year and it did not do well at all. As my wife pointed out, it's in an area that is shaded from the afternoon sun. We may end up planting a seventh tomato plant in that spot if we have no room elsewhere but for now it will remain open.
The sun was setting but I had time to plant Yellow Perfection in the south end of the "koi pond". The layer of planter mix is clearly making a difference as the ground beneath was moist without being soggy. I forgot to put an egg in the Stupice hole so the Yellow Perfection hole got two eggs along with tomato fertilizer and compost. I watered the two new seedlings just after sunset and cleaned up the space.
This morning I looked at all the planted front yard tomato seedlings and they are doing very well. No issues.
It looks like I will be working at Descanso Gardens for TomatoMania next Saturday and my wife on Sunday.
First off, I've been less than prolific posting about tomatoes this year. I'll try to do better in the future weeks.
Let's catch up first. My wife and I worked the Encino TomatoMania event last week. My wife worked Friday. I worked a little over a half day on Saturday and a full day Sunday. The seedling price was raised from $4.00 a seedling to $4.50 a seedling. Grafted tomatoes were sold this year at a $10.00 price point. I've been told that Friday was the best day ever "by far". It's not clear if that's due to total income or the total amount of seedlings sold (or both). Nevertheless the weather was good all three days. I was out in the field moving stock and I simply could not keep up.
Surprisingly I ran into an old client of mine. We had never actually met face to face before. It was a pleasant surprise to see him at TomatoMania.
As usual it was fun seeing the "groupies". It's hot exhausting volunteer work but that's true for everyone. We're all in the same boat.
So this weekend was planned to be devoted to planting some of our seedlings. That's right, we hadn't planted a single seedling yet. My wife thought that our soil level in the "koi pond" was too low, so on Saturday we went to Green Thumb in Canoga Park. We saw the end of Steve Goto's talk about tomatoes. Steve is a good speaker, very knowledgeable. We picked up a bunch of plants, about a half dozen more tomato seedlings and some bags of planter mix. But before we checked out, lo and behold, my old client showed up at Green Thumb! We met twice in the span of a week.
But we had tomatoes to plant. Oh, and other chores as well. We got home and took out all the materials. I raked back the hay in the "koi pond" to the north side, smoothed the dirt, then added the six bags of planter mix and smoothed the dirt again. Then I went to the post office, the dry cleaners, the bank, Lowe's, Walmart (to pick up Husky Cherry Red!), Petco and then back home. By then I was hungry. After eating...the sun had set. Darn it! Nothing planted.
So on to Sunday. Back to Green Thumb to buy more planter mix, tomato fertilizer and compost. I planted a Porkchop and then stopped because we were expecting company. The company came and went, back to planting. The next hole was a surprise (mostly dug before the first break) because there were a fair amount of rocks in the hole. That's a signature of our back yard but not our front yard. I filled up a one gallon bucket and parts of another bucket just with rocks from the hole. In this spot I planted a grafted Pierce's Pride. I planted the recently bought Husky Cherry Red in the next hole, followed by Hungarian Heart and Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red(1).
Then I had to stop and take a shower in preparation of more company. We had a blast in the evening with our friends celebrating Easter! Thoroughly enjoyable.
But we're off to a sloooow start this year. We only have five tomatoes in the ground. I plan to come home during the week and plant one or two before sunset, time permitting. We'll see how it goes.
Over the three day weekend last week my wife and I did a lot of work on our soil.
It seemed like an eternity since I was thinking about tomatoes, but the reality was it has been less than two months since the last harvest. First, I took out some grass in the back yard. However, this grass isn't for new growing ground. It's for placing an outside shed in the back yard. That point brings up another issue -- if things go as planned we will have less growing ground in the back yard for growing tomatoes. We grew 93 tomato plants in 2012. I suspect we'll grow around 60 this year. But...we'll see.
I also raked the hay off of the soil in the back yard. We highly recommend laying down hay during the fallow periods of the winter and early spring. Hay on top of the soil will hold moisture and a bit of heat within the soil. That encourages microbial growth and worm activity. In my opinion worms don't do a whole lot to your soil, but what they do only benefits the soil. And worms work for free. Anything you can do to encourage a happy environment for worms will pay off. Make it easy for worms to work for you! When the hay breaks down it is simply absorbed into the soil.
The hay was raked to the side, my wife applied fertilizer and phosphate and the hay was raked back over the soil. My wife also worked the soil in the raised beds and along the southern border of our back yard.
In the front yard we did a similar thing in the "koi pond". I raked the hay to the south side, my wife applied fertilizer and phosphates and the hay was raked back. The only difference involved moments of levity. There are at least 50 SunGold tomatoes in the dirt. I picked out about a dozen of them an tossed them into the streets.
Also, we had purchased some mulch and had it placed in our "corner office". We moved the mulch into all of the non-tomato growing areas of the front yard. The mulch had been purchased about three or four weeks prior and had just been sitting there waiting for us to move it into place. In that time it rained once or twice so it is inevitable some of the mulch leached into the soil. If I remember correctly, some mulch was left on top of the "corner office" but not the "koi pond". Now that I think of it I assume the corner office got some of the fertilizer and phosphate but I don't know that for a fact.
We worked pretty hard over the three day President's day weekend. We had heard a storm was going to hit on Tuesday and Wednesday, which proved true. So our soil additives got watered in somewhat. My wife also watered the front and back yards this weekend. Our soil is pretty well prepped for 2013.
We ended up with 12,199 harvested tomatoes for the year, our highest ever. To be fair, we had our highest number of tomato plants at 93. However, we tilted the extra tomatoes toward larger ones. Our ratio of small/medium/large was skewed away from the smaller tomatoes.
Here's the totals for prior years.
2007 -- 10,990
2008 -- 4,503
2009 -- 11,155
2010 -- 8,092
2011 -- 9,178
So all in all a very good year. The only disappointments were our Pineapple Pig tomatoes were just okay (they absolutely knocked our socks off in 2011) and we only got one Italian Tree tomato.
Our top ten tomato harvests for 2012 were:
SunGold -- 3911
Husky Cherry Red(1) -- 1006
Husky Cherry Red(2) -- 789
Black Cherry(1) -- 786
Snow White(1) -- 416
Snow White(2) -- 407
Yellow Perfection -- 246
SunSugar -- 244
Red Currant -- 219
Black Cherry(2) -- 183
Note: In all of 2008 we harvested 4500 tomatoes. We harvested 3900 tomatoes off of one plant this year. This year's SunGold was simply amazing.
Highlights: Indigo Rose was both unique in color (think blueberry) and the taste reminded me of a plum. We will grow this again. Indigo Apple was similar. Persimmon was beautiful. I don't think there were tomatoes that absolutely knocked our socks off but we had plenty of really really good ones. It's hard to think of a tomato that we didn't like this year. Looking it over...the 3 Green Zebras weren't good because the plant was diseased. But I can list at least 60 that I'd grow again (for instance, Brad's Black Heart).
I believe what's happening is we're slowly improving the garden year by year, especially the back yard. We pull out rocks and fill every year (and this year, even bricks!). In February we brought in a lot of compost, which helped. We may do it again this year.
All in all a very good year with an incredible SunGold plant.
Well, if it weren't for a mid-month freeze we'd still be harvesting today. Let's see how this month's harvest of 404 tomatoes compares with other years.
2007 -- 0
2008 -- 6
2009 -- 39
2010 -- 90
2011 -- 140
Better every year! But 404 tomatoes for this year is more than double any other year.
Our last harvest of the year was on December 23 when I harvested 8 tomatoes off the ground.
By the way, that reminds me of a funny story. The day before I harvested 79 tomatoes. But as mentioned previously, a fair amount were on the ground and if I touched the SunGold plant, more fell. So on the 23rd, after all the plants had been pulled, I began looking for harvestable tomatoes left on the grounds. I'd carefully inch closer. "Pop!" Stepped on a tomato I didn't see. Another step. "Pop, pop!" Backed up. "Pop!". The tomatoes on the ground were littered *everywhere*. We're going to have SunGold volunteers everywhere next year whether we like it or not (we'll like it).
Out of the 404 harvested tomatoes in December, 401 were SunGold tomatoes.
It's over for 2012. All the tomato plants were pulled out by the gardeners today. SunGold, Husky Cherry Red(2), Snow White(2) and our two winter tomatoes were all gone by about noon today.
I hadn't harvested in several days. It was either raining, cold, windy or any combination of these.
This morning I started in the back yard. I knew it had been cold (the numbers will come later) but hadn't had the time to assess the damage. Husky Cherry Red(2) had sustained some pretty good damage -- probably the worst of all the plants as it turned out -- and due to the already weakened state it was an easy decision to pull it. Next I checked Snow White(2). Less damage, but any damage is good enough for old tomato plants. Get rid of it.
Next I looked at the front yard and the mighty SunGold. The first thing I noticed was the plant had a gray pallor but also had hundreds of tomatoes on the ground. Many of them were ripe and completely salvageable.
Then I started to harvest within the plant. The slightest jiggle would send a half a dozen or more tomatoes to the ground. This happened repeatedly. It appeared that the tomato plant had simply given up, leaving extremely little support for the tomatoes themselves. I harvested as many of the ripe tomatoes as I could.
I'm not posting final numbers yet because there will probably be some ripe, harvestable tomatoes on the ground.
The winter tomato plants had a vivid, healthy green color for about a foot off the ground and the damaged black color from then on. They had to go.
The pole beans were damaged beyond repair and will be pulled. Other freeze damage was noted among the plants.
However, there is some real good news to report: My wife, after years and years and years of toiling in the garden, will have our grounds as a featured stop for the Iris Society garden tour in April of next year. Congratulations!!!!
Here's some temperature details, care of the Pierce College weather station.
December 20: 32.1 degrees at 6:30 AM.
December 21: 29.4 degrees at 6:30 AM.
December 22: 33.6 degrees at 7:30 AM.
And that's why our plants were pulled.
