This is what I garden for. If I could grow only one type of plant in my garden, it would be the scrumptious and delicious home grown tomato. This shot above was from August 15th of 2010, when the tomatoes hit full stride that year. Varieties that I can identify in this photo are the yellow Jubilee, Pink Brandywine and Cherokee Purple, all winners in my estimation.
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| Pink Brandywine |
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| Chocolate Cherry |
A couple of weeks ago I planted Chocolate Cherries, and a wonderful big and juicy yellow tomato called Dr. Wyche. I planted those early, as they were my saved seeds. Wanted a second chance if nothing germinated, but all is well. Yesterday I started Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Marglobe, and Rutgers. This morning I have started Jubilee, Roma, Oxheart, Bloody Butcher, Early Girl, and German Johnson.
All were started using the damp paper towel method. In four to five days, I will pick out the barely started seeds with tweezers, to plant them one to each cell. That way you can see which seeds germinated, and not waste time nursing non-productive cell packs for weeks. This is what I am hoping for:
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| Tomatoes on the porch, 8/15/2011 |
The onions and garlic were a nice bonus. This year I hope to freeze a lot of tomatoes as they are picked, because too many get wasted just sitting like this. And that is a despicable waste of good tomatoes.
Man! Those are some big Tomatoes!
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on this! It won't be long now and we will both be enjoying the fruits of our labor. Nice looking tomatoes!
ReplyDeletebeautiful! Our climate is marginal for tomatoes - in a good year we get bumper crops, but a cool, wet summer like last year and all we get is green tomato chutney.
ReplyDeleteHow do you grow your garlic? Do you plant in the fall or in the early spring? I ask because I haven't had any luck overwintering it and this year I'm trying planting it now.
I wish I could have one of those big tomatoes now. Just one would be a tremendous treat. The garlic that I expect and hope to produce the edible crop was planted in October or November. Bulbs that produce small cloves will be divided and replanted this fall for another growing season. So once you get started, it is a continual recycling system with small cloves being replanted to grow on. Garlic planted now may only produce bulbs that should be harvested, dried, separated to cloves and replanted in the fall. Just my experience.
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