Tomatoes!! Everything you could ever want to know about my personal tomato choices

Last year I planted one variety of tomato: chianti rose. I was absolutely blown away by the amount of flavor and glory those plants produced. I got big, beautiful, meaty tomatoes until the season was over and was thrilled. I cannot even explain to you how incredible it was to eat those giant toms with some mozzarella and a little balsamic...basil and olive oil..oh man. Holy cow. Naturally, I decided to plant only one of those again, and add 5 other varieties to the mix... Logical. I know, but this year I wanted a variety! I needed some slicers, and cherry toms, and sauce toms...I want them all!

This year I went for a sunset pear tomato blend, beef steak, chianti rose, cherokee purple, roma, and siletz

Tomato plants can be either determinate or indeterminate. This means that they will either produce all of their tomatoes all at once, or they will continually produce fruit until the plant dies. Indeterminate (the latter) is my personal favorite because I am a tomato glutton. I love them. I love everything about them and want to enjoy as many of them from the garden as possible. The thing is, Roma tomatoes, the producers of wonderful tomato sauces and soups, are a determinate variety. Siletz are the same way. I happen to enjoy both of these varieties an awful lot, so I allowed them space in my plot this year. Definitely be sure to do your tomato research before choosing your variety. The day my tomatoes stop producing is always the saddest day. 

After choosing my tomato children for the year, I planted them indoors, in peat pots, under a grow light, and let them do their thing. Since I live in the Pacific Northwest, starting these babes inside is pretty essential for getting the most out of my plants. Tomatoes like rich soil with lots of organic matter. Adding compost is always a good choice. The soil where I live has a tendency to be a bit calcium deficient (silly rain and its ability to leach good things from my soil :( ), so adding egg shells is a beautiful way to make sure your little toms get all that they need. You can find an excellent article about egg shell prep here. Eggshells provide several other advantages, but I'll let the lovely ladies at thedigin.com tell you about that!

After a while, your plant babes will outgrow their peat pots and will need to be either hardened off and planted outside (if your region/timing permits), or replanted in larger containers. When you replant or transfer your tomatoes into the ground, be sure you bury as much of the stem as possible. I usually remove the bottom most leaves, leaving just the top leaves above ground. The buried stem will start to grow roots and will make your plant much more stable. This also ensures that your developed roots are deep into the ground which will allow your plant access to the moisture and nutrients found there. Good, flavorful tomatoes require deep, occasional watering and nutrient rich soil. 

Here are what my little (some not so little anymore) ones are looking like now!

If the weather cooperates, I will start hardening these babes off in about 3 weeks, being extra careful to check the forecast for frost. Tomatoes will not tolerate a frost. I will spend about two weeks getting my tomato plants adjusted to outside conditions. See my post about hardening off for more details! After that, all that's left to do is plant these little ones in the ground and cage them!

As the season continues, I'll be sure to keep you updated on my tomato progress!! In the mean time, what tomato varieties are your favorite? What do you have growing currently? Do you have any tips and tricks for healthy tomato progress?

Rain, rain, go away...Garden update, hardening off, pea progress

It has been a hot minute! The month of March here in good ol' Corvally was definitely a rough one for this girl. Not a lot of sun really puts a damper both on my gardening efforts and my mood. I have to take a second to give mad props to the manfriend for putting up with me like a champion through this depressive period. He lives just about 3000 miles away and has basically been a saint. Love that guy.

End sappy interlude.

My little babes are growing up nice and strong for the most part and I'm pretty pleased with how my expansion turned out. I left the plastic over the section that will be dedicated to greens and snow peas for a week or so and was pleased to find a PLETHORA of worms when I pulled it back! This is an excellent sign my friends. These worms have been working hard to pull the organic matter (compost) that I piled on deep down into the soil. This creates macropores for drainage, and also incorporates that OM into my clay-filled soil plot. Soil is truly a self-organizing living body. A beautiful thing.

This is my little plot of heaven just after I planted a few square feet of greens. They're hard to see because I might have jumped the gun in planting them so soon, but I just got so excited...In there I have spinach, lacinato kale, white russian kale, curly scotch kale, collard greens, bibb lettuce, and green romaine. Quite the collection! During the summer I juice. Like...really juice. Like. A LOT of juice drinking. I like to make sure I have a pretty large collection of greens to choose from as my juices are at least 50%-75% greens.

Since I planted so early and did not give my seedlings enough time in the hardening off stage, I lost three of my plant babies to a storm. Hardening off is truly an essential part of the transplanting process. This stage involves placing the seedlings outside for a few hours a day, increasing their time spent outside as the days pass. Last year, I started putting my seedling greens outside two weeks before they ended up in the ground. Every day, I increased their exposure to outside conditions. Not only does this prevent shock in your plant babes, it also increases their ability to cope with conditions such as wind or rain. As the plant babes blow around, they strengthen their stems and build resistance to these conditions. We had a pretty solid storm shortly after I transplanted these seedlings so, I lost the youngest of the 16. Their replacements, along with another row of greens are being hardened off as I type!

The rest, I am pleased to report, are thriving! As you should also be able to see on the right, my snow peas have started poking up and are also doing quite well. I've never grown snow peas before, but I'm pretty excited about them. They're one of my favorite snacks.

I planted two varieties of snow peas from seed just to see how each would fair. Not surprisingly, the Oregon Giants did considerably better than the Sugar Ann. Go figure, eh?  The peas closer to the bottom of the picture below are the Oregon Giants, while the peas closer to the top are Sugar Anns. Just over half of the Sugar Ann seeds never emerged from the soil. Last week, I went ahead and filled in the Sugar Ann gaps with Oregon Giants. They should pop up here pretty soon!

The weather here is finally starting to calm down a little bit. We're supposed to get a little bit more rain this weekend, but after that, sun for the foreseeable future!! Look for more posts soon! Thing are about to start heating up :)