Tomatoes

Got busy after work the other evening and got the tomatoes planted out. As with the peppers, I started tomatoes from seed for the first time this year. I planted the same four varieties I had last year: Nebraska Wedding, Amish Paste, Mexico Midget and Italian Heirloom, all from Seed Savers Exchange.

The previous owners of this house had a couple tomato plants in this bed last year. That was one of the few good gardening decisions they made, so I'm also using the bed for tomatoes this year.

During compost-ageddon, I added some new compost to the bed, and the weeds and volunteers were already making good use of it. Since I have tall, sturdy tomato cages, I decided to try four plants in this bed, one of each variety.

Four a little perspective, this is the view from next to the bed, looking toward the rest of the backyard.

You can see the lovely, giant, painful-to-walk-on river rock that covers the upper portion of the wall. Our long term goal is to re-do the wall (because it appears close to failing), terrace this area into two levels, and then cover it all with gardens and growing things, instead of rocks.

The long black hose you can see in some of the pictures is the discharge for one of our sump pumps. This house has clearly had a lot of water in its basement in the past, and we have two sump pumps, as well as long hoses on our downspouts. I'm very glad all of that work was done before we got here.

Sometimes I daydream about using all of the rock to form a creek bed right down the wall along the fence on the left and using the sump pump runoff to have my own little part-time creek. I could even put a pond at the bottom. Clearly, a daydream, but fun to imagine, all the same.

Anyway, back to the tomatoes. For each of the remaining three plants, I simply cleared an area of rocks

and cut away the landscape fabric to expose an area to plant them in.

I hate landscape fabric, but it cut away pretty easily and I actually saw worms in the soil, so it's not completely dead under there.

Interestingly, when I started digging in one of the spots, I came across this:

The remains of a tree. It was soft and very easy to dig through. Guess one of my tomatoes is going to live the hugel life.

With a little warm weather and sunshine, this area will start looking like a garden, instead of a desert.