Garden Growing

[BB_TX]

If you were closer I would gladly give you some tomatoes. Mine have gone crazy. I only set out 4 plants. We have already eaten I don't know how many. Last night I counted and I had 41 setting on the counter finishing ripening. The plants are still covered with them of various sizes from small to almost ready. Been a great year for green beans, lettuce, and onions also.

 

[CGranat]

Bird, that reminds me of our green bean crop last year. We had about 120 feet of beans. We thought if we got 50 pints, we would be okay and, if we got 75 pints we would be in great shape. I ended up tilling the plants under with beans still on them after we put up our 140th pint! We were sick of canning beans. Along a similar line, my sister-in-law has started growing tomatoes from seed. This year she had 144 Roma and 70 beefsteak; all but 6 made it into a garden. With four families with large gardens, they all get used. As previously posted, i love growing things.

 

[Chuck52]

BB,

I'd just about drive down there for them! Here, even at the farmer's market, most of the "homegrown" tomatoes are from hothouses. I mulched the heck out of mine yesterday to help with the watering situation. They're setting lots of fruit, so I'll get some in a few weeks. At least the peppers really like this weather. It's amazing how those itty bitty plants put out so many peppers. I grew some from a mixed bag of hot pepper seed. Looks like most are jalapeno, but others are not yet decided. If my tomatoes cooperate, I plan to make some salsas.

Chuck

 

[BB_TX]

It's really amazing on the difference in the tomatoes. The ones I am getting from my plants are meat almost all the way through. Very small seed pockets around the edges. Seems the ones you buy are more seed and juice than meat.

 

[Mosey]

Chuck - "I mulched the heck out of mine".

What do you mulch with? Grass clippings? I've never tried mulching a garden until this year. I've been using grass clippings. So far no weeds where the mulch is, and the ground stays moist underneath. It takes a lot of clippings to cover much of an area though. That's one advantage of a big yard I guess, plenty of grass clippings! It still takes time, but I figure once I have it all mulched, which it almost is now, it will be low maintenance the rest of the year. In previous years I ran out of time and couldn't keep up with it, so it goes to weeds by the middle of July.

 

[Chuck52]

Mosey,

I mulched with some straw until I ran out, and then I used some old dry grass clippings. I wanted to wait until later in the season to mulch, because I like to work the soil around the base of the plants while hoeing. I've always heard that helps keep the soil loose and aids root development. However, my soil seems to set up like concrete after watering, and so the mulch. Do you use fresh clippings? I've been told to let them dry first. I'm going to side dress with some fertilizer today because as mulch decomposes it can deplete soil nitrogen. That's probably more inportant if you use something like sawdust or wood chips, but a little fertilizer can't hurt!

Chuck

 

[Bird]

We had to go to town for a grandson's 13th birthday party yesterday, so I picked about 9 gallons of tomatoes to take and distribute to friends and family while we were there, and I probably only picked about a fourth of the ripe ones that were there! We've got some friends who plan to come today to get 15 or 20 gallons of them to make salsa again.

 

[Chuck52]

My gosh Bird, I hope this isn't a zero sum game. If it is, you done used up my share of tomatoes!

Chuck

 

[Bird]

Chuck, the friends who were coming to get tomatoes showed up all right, but with only two shiny new 7 gallon buckets./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif The guy said his son was going to bring four of those buckets but that he told the boy they didn't want to take everything. Well, they filled those buckets and I told them to go get the other two (or more). So they said they'll be back later this evening or tomorrow because they didn't get half of the ripe tomatoes.

I hope yours do half as well as mine have (I don't want them to do as well as mine have 'cause you couldn't rid of all of them/w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif).

 

[Steelfan]

Bird , Quit rubbing it in. I'm still waiting for my first tomatoes. Your northern friend would kill for a home grown tomato sandwich. I can taste it now with Salad Dressing, Salt, and Pepper. Glad to see you had such a good crop. I hope I do as well. Kent