My comfrey plant went from one blade sticking through to thriving nearly overnight
Despite only having a fraction of the weekend to donate to the garden, it was a productive time. With Matt's help I was able to accomplish so much more. After consulting the 10 day forecast, I decided to risk putting in my tomatoes. Every year so far I have had some mishap them. The only mishap I can foresee this year is that growing them in bags won't go as planned or a surprise freeze will get me again.
Last year was a terrible year for tomatoes in North Texas. We went from a very cold, wet early spring to a very dry spring to an extremely hot month of June. However, the previous two years I did alright and was hopeful that growing tomatoes in Texas can happen. Going into my fourth year attempting tomatoes, these are my thoughts:
- Early Girl varieties seem to be my best producers. Sadly, I would love to grow heirlooms, but after experimenting with several the past two years, I have had little success. I have a few in this year that I think have been more successful, but just can't waste the space or resources in the garden for plants that give very little return.
- Pick quality transplants. This year my tomatoes came from North Haven Gardens and they are beauties. In the past, by the time I have actually gotten them in the ground, even if they started out in great shape, the plants were suffering. This year, I babied them until I was able to get them in the ground, hopefully without another freeze in store.
- Pick large plants in large pots. You DO NOT want the largest plant you can find in a tiny 4" pot. Sure it might seem like a good idea since it is already 2 feet tall, however, it will be root bound like crazy! If you are buying 4" pots, choose smaller plants. Mine were around 6" tall and the roots were perfect. However, if you can find large, thriving plants in 1-2 gallon pots, that is the way to go. If you are better organized than me, you can start with small plants and continue to pot up. If you start early, you can have a large plant ready to go in when it is safe to do so! But, if, like me, life gets in the way of your best intentions, I have noticed that Lowe's has some decent looking plants in a 1-ish gallon pot for $10. It might seem steep to pay that when you can get the little guy for $2 or less, but if you take care of that one plant, your return will be at least $10 worth of organic tomatoes that you would have purchased from the store and hopefully much more. Once the temps get well into the 90s, production goes way down, but if you can jump start with a large plant, the chance of success is much higher!
- Use floating row cover to protect tomatoes from cooler nights, strong spring winds and bugs. An ounce of prevention just might be worth at least a pound of tomatoes.
- Cover soil with a thick layer of mulch immediately. In years past I have waited a few weeks before finally getting the mulching done. It is supposed to help protect from disease. I hope this to be true as I have been troubled with what I believe to be some sort of blight every year.
If you are a successful Texas tomato grower, please leave a comment with your tips! I would especially love to hear from anyone who is successfully growing heirlooms!!
We also got a row of potatoes planted. This is something completely new for me and I have no idea what I am doing. Thankfully North Haven had a handy flier on how to plant potatoes. Next I must figure out where to find pine straw that needs to be mixed in to cover them as they grow.
Finally we began work on taming the fence. I am putting a border all the way around to hopefully prevent the weeds and grass from mixing with the plants. I am all about preventative maintenance when it is 70 degrees to lessen the amount of time I have to spend outside when it is 98 and there are chiggers to contend with.
Plants in this week:
- 9 Tomatoes - 3 Early Girl, 1 Yellow Pear, 1 Rutgers, 1 Super Fantastic, 2 Sapho, 1 Cherokee Purple
- 1 row of red potatoes
- 2 strawberry plants added to the ones that have been growing for 2-3 seasons now
- a row of carrots from seed
- a row of lettuce from seed
Time spent over the weekend -
- approx. 5 hours of Matt and I working together
- approx 1 hour spent working by myself
- 30 minute trip to Home Depot for mulch and a new hose
The Tornado inspecting what we did while he was at Grandma's house
With the floating row cover pulled back to reveal the contents of the tomato tent. You can see the black soaker hose running through the plants. Hopefully this will do a good job keeping them watered. I will add another soaker hose for a total of 100' and water other space as well but have not yet settled which space that will be. Still in process of reworking the watering set up this year.
The labels so that when I forget what went where in about 2 weeks, I have it documented!
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