After several cloudy but warm days, the sun has come out and we have a hot dry spell ahead of us. It's time to give the tomatoes some TLC.
The tomato bed was prepared a couple of months ago. Several wheelbarrow loads of SeaSoil were added and turned in. The poles for the framework were put in place and holes dug by each pole - 10 in all. Each hole was given a cup of homemade fertilizer which was watered in. The bed sat like this and waited for the nighttime temperatures to be reliably 10C and a couple of weeks ago, that criteria was reached. The tomatoes were planted in deeply and a week later were tied to the poles.
Today I trimmed off the lowest sets of leaves. This is a prevention measure for when water splashes on the soil, carrying disease to the plant. There won't be a lot of soil splashing on my tomatoes because they are mulched.
Every fall, we rake up the maple leaves below our house. They sit in a pile getting good and wet all winter. When spring comes, my husband puts them through our shredder and the resulting fluffy goodness is applied to plants that could use a mulch. It's been very dry around here lately, but when I dug into the pile, the chopped leaves were nice and damp.
After trimming the tomatoes, I applied a good 3" of leaf mulch. When the plants get bigger, I will probably trim off more bottom leaves. The mulch keeps the ground nice and moist, which is an important thing for tomatoes. They need a constant supply of moisture. They don't want to be waterlogged, but they do need the soil to be consistently moist.
All of the tomatoes are forming flowers now. My daughter, who is relatively new to vegetable gardening, asked if she should remove the flowers from her plants. She was concerned that the plants weren't big enough to support tomatoes. Leave them. As the tomatoes form, the plant also grows. If it has proper support, it will easily bear the weight of the fruit. Since all the plants in this bed are determinate, I won't be pinching off side shoots either. Gold Nugget (above) is always the earliest to flower in my garden and we love the little sweet yellow morsels.
I mulched 2 beds today. The second bed to be treated was the one containing peppers, lettuce, celery and garlic. The garlic has been mulched all winter, so this portion was fine. As this particular bed was the last long one we built, it is also the one containing the least organic matter. I've been finding that the top dries out quickly and water just runs off it. Mulch will take care of this. After weeding and watering, 3" of mulch was tucked in around the plants.
Mulching is an excellent way to treat celery, which wants lots of water. I carefully tucked handfuls of mulch around each plant, burying them up to their leaves.
Commercial growers blanch their celery, and while I'm not planning on going to extremes to get pale celery, the mulch will do some of this naturally and keep the plants moist at the same time.
Working in this bed gave me a good look at the garlic, which is now producing scapes - yum!
And that brings me to another question my daughter had for me. She was concerned about the uneven growth in her garlic. I reminded her that she'd planted several different varieties - as have I. Some of her plants are really tall and others relatively short. She was concerned that perhaps some of her soil wasn't as fertile as other patches. Not the case at all! In the picture above I have 5 different varieties growing and it's easy to see that there are different growth patterns. I have to stress that there are NO DUMB QUESTIONS in gardening. We are all - even master gardeners, of which I am definitely not one - learning all the time.
