Spring tomatoes have been planted.

In an effort to make my gardening habit more scientific I want to make a note that tomatoes were planted on March 17th 2011. This year I have three plants and two varieties: 2 Celebrity and 1 Early Girl. I planted in the usual way, which is to first soak and saturate the pots in a seaweed and fish emulsion mixture. And I threw a handful of basic organic fertilizer in the hole before planting. I saw plenty of earthworms (of what I believe are the red wiggler type) but I did not dig around as much as normal and did not add as many soil amendments as usual. There is still kale and collard greens in the garden from last fall. Everything else was killed by the cold. This must have been the coldest winter since I have lived here, in the sense that plants that usually survive the winter did not this year. The cilantro was killed, and the confederate jasmine appears to be killed also (although I noticed new growth on it yesterday). Cilantro has survived in the past and had attracted great numbers of ladybugs throughout the spring.

This year's planting date is about the same time as last year's, and last year's crop was very successful. The first tomato last year was harvested on May 17th, and their were about 120 total tomatoes harvested from 4 different plants! (And I'm not counting the cherry tomatoes.)

Update 5.24.2011: First Early Girl tomato harvested.
Update 6.27.2011: Last tomato harvested and the plants are done. 53 total harvested throughout the season.

Another Garden Update

Here is the current news on the vegetable garden. I'm still (as of yesterday) enjoying mustard greens, and have been eating them frequently for a few months now. The first harvest was probably sometime in November, but the plants have grown (and continue to grow) so well that it looks like they haven't even been touched. (Or maybe there were just so many to begin with.) In any case, the greens are delicious. I don't know if my seed will be good when the next planting time arrives, but it may not matter since I noticed a few of the plants are about to bolt.

The broccoli was also a success this year. I think it tasted as good as broccoli possibly can, which is delicious. But I have even more good news about it. I found an uncommon recommendation that broccoli can be successfully grown if the transplants are placed with an in row spacing of 4 to 6 inches. By comparison, it is easy to read elsewhere and find 12 to 15 inches as the recommendation. The smaller spacing was interesting to me because the garden is so small and I like broccoli so much. The bottom line is I planted with the 4 to 6 inch spacing and each plant produced a flower cluster of good size. I had 9 plants total.

Another interesting fact from this season is that I used no fertilizer, with the exception of some compost at planting time and the usual year-round garbage. Again the bottom line is that each plant produced more than I could eat. If all that was in spite of not applying extra fertilizer, then that's even better.

The plants will meet their end sometime, but it appears that it won't be due to cold weather. I have already seen temperatures cold enough to freeze the water in the dog's water bowl. The plants did appear damaged on those mornings, but it was only appearance. Once the day warmed the mustard greens, broccoli and lettuce appeared normal and still tasted good.

The garden on 11/14/2010.

First broccoli of the fall garden harvested 11/23/2010.

The garden on October 21 2010.

I often see this kind of spider. I have seen that they spin their webs at dusk, eat the web at dawn, and hide during the day. This one is getting ready to spin the web, I believe.

Darcy and Olivia in October 2010.