Tomato planting day is one of my favorite annual events, but it's also fraught with a lot of second guessing.  Last year, I had very good luck spacing my tomatoes further apart (which meant setting out fewer of them --- 21 instead of 37) and pruning them heavily, so this year I'll be continuing that trend.  I slipped 22 of the heftiest transplants I've ever grown into the ground on Monday, watering them in well to make up for the scorching heat.

Every year, I grow fewer slicers and tommy-toes and more romas.  In 2010, I was down to 8 non-romas, and this year I only put in 5, which feels like very few until I remind myself that they only need to keep us in fresh tomatoes over the summer.  I had planned to put in 6 non-romas, but our delicious Japanese Black Trifele seems to have carried blight spores in its seeds, so I quickly culled all of the affected plants.  That gave me space to upgrade to 17 romas in hopes of socking away even more sauce, dried tomatoes, and ketchup for the winter. 

I put most of our tomatoes in one long, new bed running along the south side of the chicken pasture.  This is the very sunniest spot in the garden, and I figure I can use the fence (with some extra posts) to train the tomatoes upright and keep them drier than ever before.  In our very wet climate, dry is what tomatoes crave, and we love them enough to give them prime real estate in the garden.  I had actually hoped to make the bed a little longer, but two solid months of wet, wet, wet has reduced me to scraping away at the last remnants of horse manure compost, so the new tomato bed ended rather abruptly when the manure gave out.  If nature smiles on us and we're able to drive the truck out this week, I'll add another ten feet of tomato bed and throw in some more roma seeds to increase our planting --- maybe this winter we'll have enough dried tomatoes that they don't have to be a once a month treat?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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