Friday, June 18, 2010

Progress with the Tomato Crop

It looks so nice, I wanted to share a picture of our vegetable garden taken from the second floor of our house.


Here is a picture with the morning sun shining on the vegetable garden. The long shadows are interesting.







This is the view out of our kitchen window. Beautiful, isn't it? Just think. It used to be just grass to cut, but now it's food to eat and share with the food kitchens for hungry folks that need a boost.





The following photos show how my tomato plants are adapting to my method of tucking in the new shoots every 1 or 2 days into the inside of the cage. So far, the vines appear to be very strong using this practice.







Notice how they appear to be so straight and tall. I think this is good for the flow of nutrients throughout the plant, rather than having a crimp in the vines where they make a hard bend from the weight.







Here's a closer look at the vines above the top edge of the cage, showing how healthy they look. It's almost as if they prefer growing straight up.








Here is a nice sized Brandywine beauty!








Here is a nice cluster of Brandywines within one of the cages. I believe the strength of the home-made cages helps promote good growth for the vines the way that I maintain them. Hopefully, there will be a higher yield than last year when the plants were staked.








Notice the nice size of these Brandywines. By the time they're ripe, several will easily be around one pound apiece. Great for tomato sandwiches!








Here you can see the Park's Whopper tomatoes growing inside the cage. They look very good with no blemishes around the blossom end of the tomatoes.





Here's another cluster of Park's Whoppers.


All my tomatoes appear to be doing very well. I use a well to thoroughly water the garden every two or three days. Of course that's a great help to the overall growth!




I use organic fertilizer on my entire garden, but for my tomatoes I use this specifically designed organic tomato fertilizer. I think it's the major contributing factor to the health and vigorous growth of my plants. I just follow the directions on the first of each month, which makes it easy to remember, and each tomato plant gets three tablespoonfuls of the fertilizer.




Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope you found it interesting and informative for your vegetable gardening.

Veggie PAK

2 comments:

  1. Wow, the plants look so healthy and the fruit is beautiful! Do you have radishes? We planted white radishes this year and while the plants grew well - about a foot tall with lots of blooms - when we pulled them there were no radish bulbs at all, just tiny little roots! Any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the comment! I've had the same problem with various types of radishes for the last two years. I also had the same problem with beets and onions. I suspected that my soil had a boron deficiency, but the results of the soil test performed by the Virginia Co-operative Extension Service identified no such deficiency. After this growing season, I'm going to resample the soil for another test, and I'm going to specifically ask them about the problems encountered with root crops. It's very peculiar.
    Have a great garden day!

    ReplyDelete