Archive for June, 2009

Tomato Update

Things are going really, really well with our tomato plants right now. Almost all of the plants have blossoms now, (except for a few, which I’ll talk about in a minute) and some are downright huge for this time of year.

The tomatoes in the new garden are thriving. I’m surprised, because the soil here is not great. It was very clayey, and we amended it with a bit of peat, topsoil, and manure, but not a lot. We also dumped tons of shredded leaves on this bed last fall. I did prepare the planting holes more carefully to try to make up for the rough soil, so I’m guessing that (and maybe the red plastic) is what did it. (Oh, and “preparing the holes” means doing the following: dig holes deep, up to the bottom-most set of leaves on the plant. Add crushed egg shells, granular organic fertilizer, and a little bit of compost to the soil I removed from the hole. Fill the hole. Repeat with next plant )

On to the old raised bed gardens. I have one tomato planted in each corner of both beds, and they’re doing pretty well. They aren’t as large as the ones in the new garden, but they also have some blooms and are coming along nicely.

Oh, and then there’s the other raised bed. We used this one to grow salad greens last fall and in late winter/early spring this year. I have three more tomatoes stuck in here. I’m pretty happy with how they’re coming along, especially given the fact that this bed gets only around five hours of full sun per day. I know they won’t produce as much as the other tomatoes with that amount of light, but hey–some tomatoes are much better than no tomatoes! Oh, and next to the raised bed is this little area that my beloved lavender once called home (you can read about what happened over at my Detroit News garden blog post, if you like). It holds, you guessed it, one more tomato plant, surrounded by basil and a few marigolds. This spot gets a little more sun than the raised bed (funny what a difference a couple of feet can make…) so the tomato is already a bit bigger than its neighbors.

I also have tomatoes planted in the beds behind the garage.

And then, there’s our awesome self-watering storage container garden. I’ll write more about this later. It is home to two ‘Early Girl’ tomatoes.

But here’s the fun news. I mentioned a while back that I was sure that Mouse, the tomato-munching cat, had destroyed my ‘Japanese Black Trifele.’ Well, there were a couple of teensy leaves left on it, so I babied it along, not expecting much. It’s put on plenty of new growth, and now lives behind the garage. It’s much smaller than the rest of the plants I started indoors, but if I get even one tomato off of it this year, I’ll be happy.

And, joy of joys, I was weeding one of the raised beds yesterday and found four stocky little tomato volunteers. They were growing in the spot that held a ‘Yellow Pear’ last year (one of my all-time favorite tomatoes!) so I dug them up and transplanted them into the large bed behind the garage.

So, the final tomato tally (unless I go crazy and end up buying more plants…) is 30 plants. Wondering which varieties we’re growing? Here’s a list:

Brandywine (2 plants)
Yellow Pear (6 plants–four of which were volunteers)
Juliet Grape
Red Pear
Early Girl (3 plants)
Chudo Rinka
Stupice
Manitoba
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Green Grape
Tiger-Like
Goji Faranji
Red Currant
Japanese Black Trifele
Heatherington Pink
Livingston’s Golden Queen
Russian Persimmon
Sub-Arctic Plenty
Ozark Pink
Dix Doights di Napoli
Polish Linguisa
Banjan Roomii

How are your tomatoes coming along?

19 comments

We have a winner!

I’m happy to announce that Chiot’s Run is the winner of a $100 gift card from Home Depot. I’ll be emailing you for your info–congratulations!!

Thanks to everyone who entered!

3 comments

Home Depot wants to give one lucky ITGO reader $100

I was recently contacted by the folks at Home Depot about running a giveaway here on In the Garden Online. While I’ve been trying to focus more on local businesses here, I couldn’t pass up the chance to give one of my darling readers a hundred bucks. Well, in all honesty, I very nearly went out and spent the $100 myself last night, but no, dear readers, your happiness comes before my own. (Remember that!)

Home Depot has a Garden Club, which you can join to get gardening tips, coupons, and instructions to help you take on a variety of garden-related projects. They also have a searchable plant library and plant care guides.

What I need you to do is visit the Home Depot Garden Club site and look through their list of garden DIY projects. Choose one you are interested in (though I can guess most of you would end up blowing the money on plants…) and come back here and tell us which one you chose. Pretty simple, eh?

You can comment between now and midnight on Sunday. Monday morning, my lovely assistant (AKA my daughter Emily) will pick one commenter’s name out of a hat, and that person wins.

Unfortunately, though I wish I could open this up to everyone, you have to live in the U.S. to win the gift card. You also have to have a mailing address (not a P.O. box) that I can send your gift card to.

Good luck, all!

Get valuable information about your region, gardening advice from pros and updates on local gardening events. Visit the Home Depot Garden Club.

16 comments

The new vegetable garden

It’s been a busy spring around here, and while I’ve spent the last few posts here giving away stuff and admiring my mad garden design skills (ha ha) I haven’t even shown you all the best part. You may now bask in the glory of my new vegetable garden:

Okay, so it’s not exactly lush and fruitful just yet, but it’s on its way! At the front are eight of the tomatoes I started inside this winter. I’m happy with the way they’re growing. The red plastic is one of our experiments this year—we wanted to see if it would really make a difference or not. So far, these are a bit bigger than tomatoes planted on the same day without the red plastic. We’ll see if the trend continues throughout the season. Behind the tomatoes, we have onions, leeks, carrots, radishes, turnips, broccoli, brussels sprouts, lettuces, watermelons, acorn squashes, and corn. At the very back, along the fence, we’ve planted potatoes. So far, everything has sprouted, and now we’re thinning seedlings. (Well, we’re thinning the stuff I planted. I’m a bit more, um, haphazard, than my husband is with the seeding….)

Here’s a view looking out in the other direction:

My favorite thing about this garden, besides all of the food we’re going to get out of it, is that this was totally wasted space before. I’ve written about this area. It started out as a butterfly garden, but it sucked because we don’t really sit and look at this area all that much. Then it was going to be a cutting garden, but I gave up on that pretty early because I was thinking it would be a good spot to grow veggies. Then last year, we had a mix of some of the perennials and some veggies, including tomatoes and some beans and cucumbers climbing the fence. Some of you might remember that my neighbors made me cry when they ripped out my plants in an insane yard cleaning frenzy (why they felt the need to clean my yard, I still don’t quite understand…)

But now we have this new veggie garden, and it more than doubles the amount of vegetable garden space we had previously. Each of the long beds is four feet wide by 15 feet long. Notice that there is nothing growing within a foot of the fence between me and my neighbor

15 comments

The winner of the soy candle giveaway is…

Congratulations, Kirsten, who left this wonderful comment:

“My desired scent? Lilac. I know, I know, there are plenty of lilac candles available. But none of the ones I’ve found have managed to capture this scent accurately. They all seem too sweet and/or overpowering for me. I have a bouquet of lilacs on my dining room table right now and as soon as I woke up this morning I could smell the delicate fragrance–all the way on the second floor. I ate my breakfast at that same table and, even sitting up close, the scent was noticeable, but soft. Delicious. If only they bloomed longer. ”

I could not agree more! And I know what you mean about how a bouquet of lilacs perfumes the entire house. It’s just heaven.

So, you win a beautiful all-natural soy candle from one of my favorite Michigan-based small businesses, Green Daffodil Soy Candleworks. I’ll be in touch with you!

And if anyone else is interested in trying out one of these awesome candles, check them out on Etsy.

Thanks, everyone for commenting. I have another amazing giveaway (though not technically a Michigan-related one) coming up at the end of the week. And congrats again to Kirsten!

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