Last year's gardening continued producing tomatoes all the way through February, though the herb gardening didn't last so long. Check out this post for a reminder of how the tomato plant was doing in January.) But it was all looking pretty haggard after we finally pulled out the bulk of the old plants:
Note the volunteer weed in the right-hand side of the brown herb garden pot. Kind of impressive, how effective weeds can be, since this pot has lived indoors since at least last October.
So I went to my local nursery, Pike, yesterday and, while they aren't amazing, and are a small chain, they certainly beat the hell out of buying plants and seeds at the gardening industrial complex of Home Despot or Lowe's. I bought a milk crate's worth of organic plants.
I got four kinds of TOMATOES!Cherokee Purple (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Celebrity: determinate, 70 days, 24-36"
Juliet: indeterminate, 60 days, 48-72"
Two tomato varieties got planted on opposite sides of five gallon buckets, and I'll thin or transplant as necessary as one or the other does better.I was tempted to go with some good looking Early Girl and Better Boy plantings, since I've had good luck with them in the past, but (A) that was in Utah with constant sunlight and crazy amounts of water, and (B) consistency is the hobgoblin of small-minded gardening porn. And while I've had so-so luck with heirloom varieties in the past, I like a little bit of a challenge in my gardening. Which must be why I do it in five gallons buckets and pots in a high-rise condo.
Oh, but for the good ol' days when my tomato gardening looked like this:
This was June 15, 2006, in the back yard in Salt Lake City. With raised beds, tons of sunlight, hundreds of dollars of water going through buried soaker irrigation, and endless hours of delight spent in the back yard maintaining plants.At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, as any of you who are also gardeners know, a lot of good gardening is love. And I loved those plants. I derived so much pleasure out of going out there in the morning before work, picking a tomato from the vine, and eating it sliced on toast within minutes. I loved being able to give away huge bags of tomatoes and squash to my co-workers, and later, when they'd had enough, on freecycle. I love the ways my hands smell after I've been working with tomatoes. I love picking up $7/pound organic tomatoes at Whole Paycheck, smelling them, and smugly knowing mine smell better.
Back to the current reality, though...
Here are the buckets after planting them. I'll move them out to the balcony soon, as we're supposed to start getting daytime highs near 80 on April Fool's Day, but we're still getting overnight lows in the low 40s and high 30s.
Juliet in front, Celebrity in the rear.
Herb plantings closeup. Clockwise from left: rosemary, garlic chives, spearmint.
Cherokee Purple up front, Red Strawberry in the rear.More herbs to come as the seasons continues, and Pike gets more choices in. I might do another entire herb planting, since J and I really love to have fresh basil and sage available for cooking.
I was smart enough to cage the tomatoes immediately. Last year when we moved to ATL, I actually didn't necessarily expect them to do so well as to require caging, and J and I had a hell of a time putting cages on the boisterous plants on mid-season.
I did make a good decision, to only plant stuff I really want to eat/cook with. Too often in the past I have been enticed by random shit at the nursery that looked fun or smelled good, like lemon balm, but then which I have almost no use for when it does grow. So this year, it's all stuff we want to cook with. And I did continue my practice of only planting stuff I can't buy for far less, organic, at Whole Paycheck (or even the local Publix.) Except as experiments in Alaska, I can't understand taking up gardening space that I can buy for less at the supermarket.
Who's excited for a long season of blog gardening porn? ME!
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