Today I shall tell you a tale of tomatoes. An epic saga of the last month as it unfolded.
This year I had some solid gardening plans that included growing a large number of tomatoes. I wanted to learn to grow something well and I chose tomatoes.
Greg asked me “But why? We almost never eat tomatoes!” My other partner, Dan, said “Blech, I won’t even eat them. They are gross.” And it’s true. When you think of how many fresh lumpy chunks of tomatoes we eat in a year, the number is quite small. Perhaps 5-6 tomatoes a YEAR grace my table.
Then I asked a simple question; “When was the last time we ate something with tomatoes?” Of course they struggled to recall, so I suggested the previous Monday evening. It finally hit them. We had pizza. Tomatoes are in pizza. And BBQ sauce, and ketchup and salsa and pasta and curry… Tomatoes are EVERYWHERE in our diet! And I wanted to stick those squishy, awful vegetables into a blender and put them in jars and eat them throughout the year, served up with sausages and grains and potatoes and garam masala.
So they understood, I wanted a LOT of tomatoes. And I wound up with around 30 seedlings. Seedlings that grew well under some lamps in my living room. The weather got warm. It was well above freezing. We were getting lots of alternating rain in the 50’s and blazing sun in the mid 60’s. It was perfect growing weather for most plants. I took my strong started seeds and started hardening them off by setting them outside the windows for the sunny hours of the day.
Finally our last average frost date hit, and I set them outside in the garden bed to stay there overnight. the weather was still perfect and had gotten just a bit warmer on average. We were hitting the occasional day in the upper 60’s. We started having cookouts. I woke up to discover nothing but stems the next day. Greg had not properly checked the chicken pen door, and my tomatoes had been demolished and the peas and beans I’d planted a week before were dug up. I had pots upon pots filled with 30 stems of former tomato plants.
I rushed the plants back indoors, under my lamps and where they could be well nourished and amazingly most of them survived! They grew new leaves and were flourishing. We had even purchased a few small back up Roma tomato plants from the hardware store, and they were gaining real ground on these completely uneaten plants.
Two weeks after our last average frost date. The majority of the plants move outside and go into the ground. A few stay indoors to continue to recover. It’s been a bit cooler, but not significantly so. The weather looks cooler, but safe still for the week with lots of rain, and is predicted to get hotter the next week. So into the ground they went!
The cold seemed to cling a bit, but it was raining steadily. And then I woke up to an absolutely frigid morning.
I rubbed my eyes. I peered out my window and wondered when my neighbors re-did their roof in such light colored roofing tiles. It had been a while since I slept in that room (as I have two bedrooms). Then I wondered when the neighbors painted their AC unit white on top. And if they had power-washed their driveway so it was so white…
Snow. Two and a half weeks after our last average frost date.
I jumped up and collected Dan, and we went outside with jugs of steaming water. At this point I realized it wasn’t snow at all, it was 1-2 inches of small hail. It was warm enough to slowly melt the hail, but not nearly fast enough. We poured the water around and on the plants to melt the hail and heat the ground and thaw the plant’s frozen leaves. The mulch was dark and would absorb some sun. As we finished watering down the plants, the ground around them was steaming between the hail and the hot water that was soaked in the ground. It took something like an hour to melt the hail and create a warmer microclimate for the tomatoes with hot water… All the while my back yard was flooded something awful and our shoes and sock became soaked with ice-melt from the hail.
It worked… Mostly. Nearly every plant has survived the debacle and is starting to really come back! It’s impressive. And I have the few plants that were struggling to recover that have no gained massive growth on their outdoor counterparts to plant in the spots where the other plants have failed.
And so the tomato saga continues. They are finally starting to set green, undamaged leaves on their crowns. The weather has been feeling like it’s blazingly hot, but I know it’s just warm, being in the low 80’s on some days. It’s really the perfect weather for the tomatoes to grow and they are doing so energetically despite their setbacks.
The peas and beans we planted after the chicken debacle are now sprouting and growing fast. A sole, lonely cucumber is attempting to sprout and grow. My two corn plants continue to truck along as well. The spicy peppers are outdoors as well; they, too, suffered from the frost. The bell peppers are still indoors under lamps. The leftover tomatoes are starting to move outdoors. One zucchini died, the other one lives, and the watermelon plants appear to be starting to recover as well. The kale is growing very strong and we’re looking forward to salads and leafy greens! We filled the space that would have been zucchini with onion sets. The strawberries are well established now, but just aren’t doing much. Their bed is new, and still very rough and struggling to become healthy soil.
My camera continues to be out of commission. I shall try to get some photos tomorrow for my next update. Perhaps I shall simply have photo days on the blog.
quarteracrehome 