Tomato Harvest

Tomato Harvest

The picture represents a very small fraction of the total tomato yield.  I have forty plants growing in two beds.  The 20 different types I grow our mostly heirloom varieties and a lot are started from saved seed. One hybrid I have grown for a lot of years is Sungold.  This small yellow/orange cherry tomato is always the first tomato to produce and it remains very productive right up until frost. We grow several varieties of cherry tomatoes, different paste...

Improved Tomato Trellis

Last year I bought a bundle of 7’ bamboo stakes specifically to build a reliable tomato trellis.  I built a beefy structure that performed well, but it had drawbacks.  Here is last year’s trellis post. This year I’ve simplified the design.  I eliminated the traditional tomato cages. In a well-trellised system, the cages are only in the way.  They are hard to weed around and fruit gets wedged in the wires.  I’m also using the t-posts that hold up the structure as...

Tomato Trellis Performs Well

Early in July I posted about a heavy duty tomato trellis I constructed with T Posts and bamboo stakes: T Post and Bamboo Tomato Trellis.   I’m happy to report the trellis performed exceptionally well.   I’m going to build one again, next year and I already know some minor changes I’m going to make. Lacing the tomato stems to the bamboo forces the plants to maintain excellent vertical growth. A lot of the plants are growing well over the 8 foot height of the bamboo...

T-Post and Bamboo Tomato Trellis

I didn’t have the heart to cull out some of my beautiful and healthy tomato starts so I ended up with 78 plants in two beds.  My normal planting is 60 plants in two beds so I had to cheat a little on the spacing.  I opened up the width across the rows and pushed the plants as far to the edges of the bed as I thought I might get away with.  I still came close to a 20″ spacing between plants and that’s close to what I always do. I’d already...

Anticipating the Main Harvest

Here Come the TomatoesWith this year’s warm weather, we’ll be picking things from the garden a lot earlier than most years.  I’m often late getting things started, but I did a good job of getting the tomatoes, peppers, and cole crops into the ground before the end of May.  The early start coupled with the hot weather is giving us veggies in July that we normally don’t start harvesting until August.  All in all, it appears we will have a...

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