Growing Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes (2010 crop)

Nothing says "Backyard Garden" like tomatoes. Nothing you can buy in a store will ever beat the taste of those
you grow yourself. Even city dwellers can manage to grow a couple of these on a patio or balcony. Although they
are relatively easy to start from seed, this year we planted about 40 started seedlings. We ended up with about 24
"Super Sweet 100" (the sweetest and best cherry tomato I have yet found) and a few of each of the following:
"Beefmaster," "Early Girl," "Mr. Stripey," "Roma," and "Lemon Boy." This collection should give us about
2-3,000 tomatoes if we have a good year. The seedlings were planted in rows about 2 feet apart with each indidual
plant spaced about the same. With this "dense" planting, we are going to need to stake the plants as they will
quickly start sprawling all over the ground making it difficult to weed and harvest the tomatoes.

The tomato crop as it appears around the second week of June. We also have our first Roma tomatoes
coming in! This is cheating a bit, as we bought these quite large and they had a huge headstart from
the greenhouse.

By June 19th, almost all the tomatoes were flowering and many had green tomatoes visible. We also
replaced one of the "casualties" (a supersweet 100 that died) with an unusual heirloom variety known
as "Black Prince." This variety comes from Siberia of all places and claims to produce black tomatoes.

By July 5th most of the tomatoes were close to 5 feet high and needed staking. We ended up using
quite a few of the steel posts (from the old goat fence and chicken pen) for this particular job. Almost
all the plants have green tomatoes on them at this point.