Hello everybody,
We have been working away on the garden and I completely forgot to post anything this week. Sorry about that!
We have beds 3 and 4 installed and filled with soil and all planted out with tomatoes. I absolutely adore tomatoes. Not those scary plastic things that you buy in the grocery store in the dead of winter but the amazing vine ripened ones that simply taste of a hot summer day. My absolute favourite is to have a toasted tomato sandwich with the first big tomato I can get my hands on. Just love them!
So this year we planted out two raised beds of them. I reckon there is about 40 plants in there and I do still have others that we will try to sneak in here and there. The tomatoes were set in about 18" apart. When I plant them I put them in deep, right up to the first set of true leaves so a lot of the stem is underground. They will send out roots all along that stem which helps to stabilize and feed the plant. I have inter-planted with lettuce, spinach and chard down the middle of the beds. It will be up and out of there before the tomatoes really need the room.
All of them are heritage varieties and with the exception of the roma tomato called "San Marzano", all of them are new to me. I cannot wait to see what they will all be like. One thing I can tell you is that germination was absurdly slow. Some of them took close to two whole months to come up. All these seeds came from a company new to me, namely Baker Creek Seeds. I will be saving my own seed from all these varieties so I will be interested to see if they are just as slow next year. As a precaution I will start them much earlier.
The beans that I planted out last week are mostly up and growing a treat now. I did plant the "un-germinated" seed and that is not up as yet. Frank made a cover from pieces of hardware cloth as the birds just love to pluck those new little plants our of the soil. This will keep them off until the plants are a few inches high and then we will remove the cover.
We have seen a new bird around the house lately. We had to get out the bird book to see what it is and were delighted to find that it is a member of the "flycatcher" family. In fact it is an Eastern Phoebe. They have built a nest on our roof, just where two sections of roof meet and Frank says that there are three little eggs in the nest.
One last thing. I believe on several occasions I have mentioned that we live in an area known as "The Canadian Shield". Basically what that means is we have a lot of rocks. We are getting ready to put in the next garden bed and there were a couple of rocks poking up from the ground. Frank grabbed a shovel and set to work on them. The first one came out quite easily. It was about the size of a honeydew melon. The second one as you can see from this photo was somewhat larger. It took a while to get it out of there and now we will have to haul it out of the garden as it is in the way. This of course explains the fact that everyone has a huge rock pile or two on their property as well as rock walls around everybody's land. A lot of the time you see a rock poking it's head up out of the soil and it is quite literally just like the tip of an iceberg. These two came out fairly easily but often the rocks are simply massive and you simply have to work around them. Such was the case in one of our asparagus beds. We just had to leave it there and plant around it.
Well that is it for me for tonight. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend and thanks so much for visiting with me. Cheers.
We have been working away on the garden and I completely forgot to post anything this week. Sorry about that!
We have beds 3 and 4 installed and filled with soil and all planted out with tomatoes. I absolutely adore tomatoes. Not those scary plastic things that you buy in the grocery store in the dead of winter but the amazing vine ripened ones that simply taste of a hot summer day. My absolute favourite is to have a toasted tomato sandwich with the first big tomato I can get my hands on. Just love them!
So this year we planted out two raised beds of them. I reckon there is about 40 plants in there and I do still have others that we will try to sneak in here and there. The tomatoes were set in about 18" apart. When I plant them I put them in deep, right up to the first set of true leaves so a lot of the stem is underground. They will send out roots all along that stem which helps to stabilize and feed the plant. I have inter-planted with lettuce, spinach and chard down the middle of the beds. It will be up and out of there before the tomatoes really need the room.
All of them are heritage varieties and with the exception of the roma tomato called "San Marzano", all of them are new to me. I cannot wait to see what they will all be like. One thing I can tell you is that germination was absurdly slow. Some of them took close to two whole months to come up. All these seeds came from a company new to me, namely Baker Creek Seeds. I will be saving my own seed from all these varieties so I will be interested to see if they are just as slow next year. As a precaution I will start them much earlier.
The beans that I planted out last week are mostly up and growing a treat now. I did plant the "un-germinated" seed and that is not up as yet. Frank made a cover from pieces of hardware cloth as the birds just love to pluck those new little plants our of the soil. This will keep them off until the plants are a few inches high and then we will remove the cover.
We have seen a new bird around the house lately. We had to get out the bird book to see what it is and were delighted to find that it is a member of the "flycatcher" family. In fact it is an Eastern Phoebe. They have built a nest on our roof, just where two sections of roof meet and Frank says that there are three little eggs in the nest.
One last thing. I believe on several occasions I have mentioned that we live in an area known as "The Canadian Shield". Basically what that means is we have a lot of rocks. We are getting ready to put in the next garden bed and there were a couple of rocks poking up from the ground. Frank grabbed a shovel and set to work on them. The first one came out quite easily. It was about the size of a honeydew melon. The second one as you can see from this photo was somewhat larger. It took a while to get it out of there and now we will have to haul it out of the garden as it is in the way. This of course explains the fact that everyone has a huge rock pile or two on their property as well as rock walls around everybody's land. A lot of the time you see a rock poking it's head up out of the soil and it is quite literally just like the tip of an iceberg. These two came out fairly easily but often the rocks are simply massive and you simply have to work around them. Such was the case in one of our asparagus beds. We just had to leave it there and plant around it.
Well that is it for me for tonight. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend and thanks so much for visiting with me. Cheers.
I look forward to seeing how your tomatoes grow Melanie. I completely agree with you on the whole rock thing, as we have dug out a couple of massive boulders (using a back hoe) at our property.
ReplyDeleteKelly