Anne's 2015 Nor-Cal plant-out

[aclum]

Well, I can't get the last few photos to load, but may give it another try tomorrow

So that's it for now!

Anne

[aclum]

Hi,

Just a quick update....

I added some more drop lines to the ends of my raised beds so I can direct the plants at the ends of the rows a bit "around the corner" to the short ends of the beds. Adjusting the clips I can sort of rearrange things to "lean and lower" the plants a bit (similar to what's done in commercial greenhouses and what Bill's done) effectively giving me a shorter plant. Fortunately, I enjoy pruning and adding/reaqdjusting the tomato clips.

While I was at it, I took a count of the green fruit on various plants. Around 120 on 2 cherry tomato plants, and 496 non-cherries. So far, Carbon's the most productive with 40 fruit followed by Lee's Sweet with 25 and Purple Dog Creek with 20 so far. A large Carbon is just now definitely blushing and I'll probably be picking it in a couple of days.

On the Eva Purple Balls - ungrafted has 12 fruit, grafted onto Yorkbec has 11, and the EPB grafted onto Estamino has 19 in spite of losing it's growing tip at plant out and getting off to a slower start than the other two.

I guess Goose Creek is one of my must have tomatoes. Since my "Goose Creek" in the garden turned out to be some sort of cherry, I broke down and planted a couple new seeds of that variety and, while I was at it, 5 additional varieties. I'm hopeless !

Anne

[rnewste]

Anne,

Goose Creek is one of my favorites.

I hope you can just get the water you will need all Summer - we are on a 30% mandatory water reduction over here in San Jose.

No Hot Tub this year and if I have to, I will stop watering the front lawn in order to keep the EarthTainers watered.

There was an old Thread about peeing on your tomato plants - I may have to start doing that for a different reason - not sure the neighbor lady will understand.

Raybo

[aclum]

Hi Raybo,

I hope so too! We're not metered yet (meters are in place but not scheduled to be hooked up for a couple of years - last I heard). If and when they do hook up the meters, since past use wasn't metered, I'm not sure how they'd determine our allocation. I guess it would be determined by lot size or number of residents. But we have been trying to conserve as much as we can prior to any crackdowns.

We've got ALOT of lawn and have cut back on watering from 4x a week to once a week for a minimal amount of time - just enough to have a bit of overspray to the side landscaping and keep the trees from dying. We're definitely not going to have green lawn anywhere this summer - but I hope we can at least keep the lawn areas from reverting to bare ground.
Without going into the (possibly embarrassing ) details, since neither of us work or have occasion to go out much, our typical household water use is already pretty minimal.

I have cut way back on my tomato watering. I've been waiting until the plants look like they might be getting a little wilty before running the soaker hose. (I'm thinking I might vaguely approach something like dry farming with smaller but more intensely flavored tomatoes). Fortunately, the weather hasn't been too extreme and we've had a few very timely rainstorms so they haven't suffered from the infrequent watering. In fact, the plants seem really healthy this year compared to what I usually have at this stage, so I'm hoping that this means that the plants have developed some good, deep roots going down into the clayish soil below.

The soaker hoses are under perforated silver mulch and everything's under aluminet shade cloth, so the soil surface evaporation should be minimal. It also dawned on me that the fairly substantial pruning I do MIGHT mean less leaf surface area for transpiration (and less water loss) - but that might just be wishful thinking.

Anyway, we'll see what happens - the tomatoes are certainly a priority when it comes to water usage for us. Unless the water restrictions become absolutely draconian, I think I should be able to keep at least the tomatoes going.

Good luck with your tomatoes and cukes and coping with the drought! Sorry about the hot tub .

Anne

[aclum]

Hi,

Here are a few quick photos showing how I'm doing the "lower and lean" type thing to effectively shorten the height of the tomato plants as I described previously. Note that I'm lowering the plants by repositioning the vines with the trellis clips rather than lowering or extending the droplines themselves.

I've just done the first (oldest) 3 rows as the other plants are still too small. I think to really make it work, you have to start with the plants tall enough to have at least a foot or two of bare stem at the base to work with. In at least one instance, I needed to sort of criss-cross stems of different varieties past each other in order to get things lowered. It dawned on me that some sections with stems running nearly parallel to the ground seemed almost like sprawing rather than trellising, in a way.

I managed to reduce the height of most of the plants by at least a foot.

You have to use some reasonable care bending the plants, but they were pretty supple for me today. They haven't been watered recently (but not yet showing signs of wilt) and I imagine plants that had been recently watered might be a bit more brittie (just a guess - correct me if I'm wrong).

The photos, in order, are of partial rows with the named variety at the end of the row: Eva Purple Ball on Yorkbec, Work Release Paste, and Santa Clara Canner on Estamino.

Anne

[efisakov]

Very nice pictures, Anne. Tomatoes look pretty happy with all that you do.
What do you use Eva for? Do you can them whole?
What kind of thread do you use for the trellis?
Great job overall. Your garden is impeccable.

[aclum]

Hi Ella,

Thanks for the nice comments! It seems like the less I'm able to do physically, the more organized the garden has to be out of necessity. It's not like I'm naturally neat or organized and I'm sure things would have a much more "casual" look if I could get away with it . The tomatoes do seem happy, but I think a lot of that has to do with the absolutely perfect weather we've been having. It's been very unusual.

I'm using Bridon Cordage "ultima" Baler Twine. It's a poly twine with a 110 lb tensile strength. I bought mine at a local farm supply store, but I think you might be able to find it at a store like Tractor Supply or online. I forget who it was, but someone recently posted a link to a similar orange twine from Hydro-Gardens, iirc. The ends can fray a bit and it has a bit of a slick surface feel so that simple overhand knots can slip. But I found that I can keep- the knots from slipping by clipping a tomato trellis clip on the line right up tight under the head (?) of the knot. You can see this if you zoom in on the first photo in my last post. I love the stuff.

Not sure what I'll do with the EPB in particular, but canning them whole sounds like a great idea. They seem to be just about the right size. I've just canned sauce and salsas so I'll have to check out some recipes for canning the whole tomatoes.

I hadn't actually planned to grow EPB this year, but used the seed for early grafting practice so I wouldn't waste any "good seeds" on mistakes. (I have a lot of EPB seeds ). I've grown it before and remember liking it, but there were other varieties I wanted to try this year. Long story short, I wound up keeping the 3 EPBs plus a Bush Early Girl and Yorkbec (about the same size fruit as the EPBs) - that I hadn't really planned on. Now I'm sort of glad I have them.

Good luck with your gardening season! Hope to see some photos soon .

Anne

[efisakov]

Thank you, Anne. Looking forward to see more pictures from you.

[aclum]

Hi Again,

I'm back with a couple more photos for anyone who might be interested.

The first is a view of the garden from the patio around noon. It gives an idea of my overall set-up for those who haven't seen it before. The beds in the front row are each 16' long x 3' wide with a 3' path on all sides. Directly behind these rows are two beds each 16' long x 5' wide. The shade cloth is 40% aluminet that's probably stretched out to about 30% shading.

The neighbors behind us cut down a huge tree that would have been off to the right out of view in the photo, but used to shade a good deal of the eastern end of the garden until about 11am. So having it gone makes quite a difference in the overall amount of sun the garden receives. We've got a fairly tall tree in the middle of our back lawn, but you can see from the photo that it doesn't cast a shadow on the garden. The shade cloth keeps the garden considerably cooler in the summer than it would otherwise be and helps protect the fruit from sunscald with might otherwise be a problem as I tend to prune fairly heavily.

The second photo is a new one of row 2 - starting with Purple Dog Creek in the lower right corner. I'd just finished pruning the plants a bit so they wouldn't be protruding into the pathway too much. Next to the Purple Dog Creek are Wes (with some nice big fruit), Dana's Dusky Rose, German Red Strawberry, Russian 117, Lee's Sweet. Wolford's Wonder, German Johnson, and (wrapping around the far end of the bed) Work Release Paste.

I picked my first ripe tomato (a Santa Clara Canner) a couple of days ago and it'll probably be perfectly ripe tomorrow - 69 days since transplant. I did, finally, notice a few flying bugs in the garden today. Not sure what they are, but I did identify one lacewing (as well as the Bumble Bee) and haven't noticed any damage to the plants so I think I'll just wait a while before doing anything (like putting up sticky traps).

Anne

[JamesL]

Anne,
You know we are always interested!
Lookin' good!

[aclum]

Hi,

Time for another garden update. It's been 3 months and one week since my first plant-outs. I guess each year is different and this year's garden has been REALLY different for me (in a good way).

First of all, with the drought I've just been watering once or twice a week. For the past month or so, it's just been once a week, but I'm going to twice a week since it's gotten hotter. I'm just growing a few peppers, some eggplants, swiss chard, and the tomatoes. No other veggies this year and I'm letting the asparagus and artichokes die (or "go brown" in the case of the lawns).

Most varieties are doing great, but some varieties have much smaller fruit than usual with thicker skins. Also, I've had an unusual amount of BER (I normally don't have any or just a bit on some paste varieties). The BER is sort of scattered here and there and not on all varieties, but was particularly bad on the Bradley and Anna Russian. (I've got such a surplus of fruit this year that losing a few tomatoes to BER doesn't really bother me that much - and the plants are now growing out of it). I also have a few plants that seem stunted in one section of one bed - that I think is the result of a problem in the soil of some sort rather than reduced watering.

I've used TTF food 3 times since plant-out. I don't have any idea why - but I have basically had ZERO bug or disease problems this year. I put up yellow sticky traps that now have some small bugs on them, but nothing compared to usual. I prune fairly heavily to begin with, but I haven't had to trim many leaves due to discoloration (for whatever reason).

While the first wave of tomatoes has been ripening up, most of the new blossoms in the past month have dried up. Now that I've upped the watering a bit to 2x per week, I'm starting to see new blossoms form.

The plants themselves don't seem to have grown that much since my last photos (and doing a modified lower and lean and topping a few of the taller plants). Since deciding to top the plants, I've let more side branches grow out and haven't done any significant pruning in the past month. Amazingly, in spite of reduced watering and hot weather the plants haven't shown any signs of significant wilt (although I'm not out in the garden during the heat of the day). It's sort of weird - almost like time is standing still in the garden except for the ripening fruit and emergence of new blossoms. Not the usual progression of garden misfortunes as the season progressses that I'm used to. Let's hope it lasts (knock on wood, etc.).

As to the harvest so far..... Today I picked 8 pounds of fruit, bringing my total to date to 102.417 lbs. The first few tomatoes of the season were sort of watery and disappointing (as seems to be the case each year), but recently they have been just delicious. I've been getting the black tomatoes for a few weeks now and they're especially good this year.

There's no way the two of us can keep up eating the tomatoes as they ripen (have been having lots of tomato salads, gazpacho, blt's, etc.) so I've been tossing the extras into the freezer for later pressure canning. I've just done one batch of sauce so far, but I'll be doing another sometime this week. (BTW the new motor I got for the Victorio Food Strainer works great and sure makes things a lot easier).

I've got a scale and notebook by the back door and have been recording the number and weight for each variety I harvest as I bring them in the house. Hopefully I can get around to adding things up some day, but right now Santa Clara Canner, Purple Dog Creek, and JD's Special C Tex have been the big producers.

Guess that's it for now .

Anne

[rnewste]

Hi Anne,

Sounds like you are having a great year, in spite of the drought. Regarding BER, I too am seeing it on random plants (also some random brown spots) but nothing significant. Likewise, I have not seen a single Spider Mite or their damage to date.

Maybe the drought is keeping them at bay. Can only hope it lasts. Will be putting up my shade cover as well soon to protect from sun-scald. Good times!!

Raybo

[efisakov]

Hi, Anne. Good results. Keep posting some pictures. JD's Special C Tex was good for me last year as well both taste and production. It may be not the tastiest tomato but pretty good.
Any new variety that stand out for you?

[aclum]

Raybo,

Yeah, it also occurred to me that the lack of bugs might be due to the drought. Unfortunately I haven't seen any bees around except for a single bumble bee two days in a row about a month ago.

Ella,

The tomatoes are just starting to get really good so I don't think I've tasted all of them at their prime yet. The biggest surprise so far was that Yorkbec actually tasted really good to me - I wasn't expecting much in such an early tomato from Canada. Margaret Curtain and BKX have both been wonderful. A tad better than JD's I think. Did a little taste test last night of 7 varieties. Red Barn and Mikado Pink were first and second (both excellent). Daniels, Bradley, and Crinkovic Yugoslavian came in next but they weren't far behind. We were less impressed by Dester (sort of an odd taste) and Purple Dog Creek (which was a bit sharp - I think a bit underripe).

We'll be having our first Anna Russian and Aunt Ginny's Purple tonight. I'm really looking forward to those.

3 of my plants turned out to be mislabeled. The African Queen turned out to be some sort o black (JD's?), Goose Creek a red cherry, and Carbon a red or pink smallish round tomato. I'm disappointed in that, but might try for those again in the fall.

I picked my first Brandywine Sudduth and Big Rainbows today to ripen up indoors. I have quite a few plants that haven't produced any ripe fruit yet (but have green fruit).

I'll try to post some photos before too long. I need to sort of tidy up in the garden first - with the heat I haven't stayed out in the garden long enough to pick up after myself .

BTW, your tomatoes (and flowers) are looking great and fantastic photos!!

Anne