Too Many Tomatoes

My spring fever officially began a few weeks ago now. We have had sub-zero temperatures for way too long! It is finally starting to warm up, so I have officially started planning my gardens for the summer.

Last year was the first year that I attempted starting plants from seeds inside the house. We had folding tables, counters, and shelves all covered with little seedlings! I was (unreasonably) terrified that they wouldn’t grow… but then they did!

My dad helped me plant and we figured we might as well use all of the seeds in each packet because there was no way that they would all germinate! While they didn’t ALL germinate, MANY did. By the time we were ready to transplant everything outside, we had over 200 Roma Tomato plants, as well as many flower seedlings! I must add that while many of these little beauties were able to find a home, I planted way more than I needed or could give away, so this year I plan to focus on having more variety!

Needless to say, we had many tomatoes to harvest, eat, and process. Not complaining though! I will give you all of the details about how we preserved these (and other yummy garden produce) in later posts! Last year, I kept things very simple and used a standard bag of potting soil for all of my seeds and used previously saved and locally purchased containers. This year, I am testing a couple different kinds of dirt and have a whole new setup! I am excited to share that with you soon after I have it all set up!

Above, you can see that we utilized both cages and stakes for the tomato plants. While the stakes were much cheaper, we actually had a couple of them bend! This might be due to how large the plants got or the wind. The garden pictures are out at our (hopefully) future house building site which is on a lake, so it can become fairly windy at times. I have also heard not to let the plants get too big so they can focus their energy on growing fruit. I really like to see how big they can get, so I kind of let them do their own thing and go wild but will test the theory of limiting growth with a few plants this summer to compare!

I generally plant the tomatoes into the ground as soon as I see the “low” temperatures consistently in the 40s. I have had to cover them a couple of times per year in the past, but it’s normally not very many times. Save old sheets for this! They work great and are light weight so they don’t smash your plants!

I learned from my dad and grandma, who learned from my great-grandma, that the best way to plant a tomato is to cover the lowest leaves in the dirt, as in plant them fairly deep. I don’t have scientific evidence to prove this, but I did have tomato plants up to my shoulders using this strategy! We have done this since I was little and it has so far been working so it’s what I will continue to do!

For now, I am going to continue planning out what all I want to have and determine which seeds I need to start indoors and which can wait until it’s warm enough to sow them directly into the garden. Here’s to hoping warmer weather is on it’s way!