What's Growin' On: 4/16/06

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This Photo Makes Me See Red

Realization Of The Day #2:
I have Garden Vision. When I am in my garden, what I look at and what I see are often not one in the same. Take the photo above for example. I do not see 11 itty bitty tomato plants that may or may not survive all that Mother Nature is going to throw at them. I see pounds and pounds of ruby red bounty just ripe for the plucking, plates of sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and vinegar and dusted with salt, a bustling, steamy kitchen in the middle of shrinking down summer--even next winter's pizzas being slid onto a hot baking stone. But would anyone else? Who cares. I know what's coming. I know what I see. I have the vision.



San Marzano Tomato Plants Ripe For Planting
Click here to see how much they grew in just 10 days. That's the Magic Of Manure Tea, I tell you.

Time To Say Tomato:
Despite two new baby lambs and an unexpected little rainstorm yesterday (all welcome diversions), I did manage to put 11 ecstatic San Marzano tomato plants (started from seeds I saved from my best 2005 tomatoes) into a raised bed. Well, I know that I was ecstatic at least. In fact, I was so excited about just getting some tomato plants into the ground that I completely forgot about hardening them off. That's right. My spoiled seedlings went straight from greenhouse to garden. Talk about a culture shock. Ten minutes in the ground and they were already starting to wilt. Oops. At least I buried them up to their little necks--and there were only three hours left until sunset.

Quick Tomato Planting Primer:
So in a perfect garden, this is what happens. First you harden off your plants. This simply means setting them outside for progressively longer and longer periods each day (starting with only an hour or two) so that they can begin to experience the harshness of life in the great outdoors--sun, wind, rain, little bugs, big marauding dogs and cats.




When you are ready to transplant, do it on a cloudy, fertile day in the third quarter (April 19th & 20th this month). There are two schools of thought on fourth quarter gardening. Some believe that it is a bad time to do pretty much anything but weed or mulch. Others treat it the same as the third quarter. (Fertile fourth quarter days this month are April 24th and 25th). And then there are those of us who wish we'd never learned about this minding the moonsigns business because now we're completely paranoid about doing something on the wrong day. (I know, I know. I promised to explain more about it. Soon. But I'm warning you--you probably don't really want to know.) If cloudy weather is not in the forecast (yes, that's sun shining brightly on my plants in the photo), wait until late afternoon so they'll at least have all night to settle in.

As I mentioned in a previous post, you then need to put your faith in me and pinch off all but top two or three leaves of each plant.



That means that your plants are going to go from looking like this



to this. But roots will shoot out of each of the pinched parts, and this will make your little plants strong and happy.

Then you carefully place each plant into a hole in which you have sprinkled 1 teaspoon of epsom salts (NOT table salt; find it in a bag or carton in the pharmacy section). There is a scientific reason for doing this, but I don't remember what it is. I promise you it helps, though.

Water each of the seedlings very well, and cover them with something (a cloche, a floating row cover, an old bedsheet, a bucket) if overnight temperatures are expected to go below 50F. Then stand back, take a look, and see what you can see--and pray to the garden gods if you're into that sort of thing.



And remember to always keep a few replacements at the ready (because even I can see that this poor plant is exactly what it looks like--nearly dead).