Wednesday, August 21, 2013

It won't be long

Some of the tomatoes in the garden are starting to turn red. Most of the fruit is still green, but they look pretty good. All twenty-four of the plants I grew from seed survived and are now full of fruit. The other three volunteers (cherry tomatoes) are thriving like the weeds they are. If the weather holds, we should have a good crop.

Plum tomatoes (I think) on the vine. Two in the back are turning red.

There are more tomatoes growing outside the garden. We have a volunteer that popped up in the gravel walk outside the back door. Neither one of us has pulled it out and now it has blossoms on it. There are another few growing up in the compost pile. They really grow like weeds.

The main tomato plot contains sixteen plants of several varieties.

I planted a few each of several different tomato varieties. Naturally I didn't keep track of which variety I planted where, so I can't tell which is which. Oh well. Nevertheless, I think I've done a decent job of pinching suckers and stripping off the larger green leaves this year. Some of the suckers still made it past me, so there are a couple of plants with multiple stems. Once the secondary stems have blossoms and fruit, I'm reluctant to prune them away.

5 comments:

  1. It isn't a religion to pinch out all the side shoots...
    many can support three 'main' stems...
    but it does mean that you have three stems to make sure that you have pinched clear, though!!

    And Cherry Toms can, if you wish, just be left to get on with their business.

    I'm experimenting with growing on some larger, pinched out side shoots this year...
    and it is a good way of growing the more expensive 'heritage' varieties...
    sow earlier, treat the first plant as a 'mother' and grow on the pinched out side shoots as the main plants.
    My experiment is...
    how late can you use this system and still get a crop?! They are all shoots that would have hit the compost heap, so the only effort has been rooting them and then planting them out.

    Our Lemon Boy beef-toms are producing well already... and so are the Black Cherry, Nectar and Sungold [also both cherries].

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  2. Isn't it fun winding the stems around the tuteurs? There'd always a flower shoot in the way... P.

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  3. love eating tomatoes. All they need is some pepper and salt.

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  4. After such a shaky start to summer, your produce is looking quite nice!
    Show us that "weed tomato" in the gravel once there is a fruit! That's kind of fun, isn't it!

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  5. You are going to have a ton of tomatoes judging from the photos.

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