Yesterday was the day! The big event of the year! And I almost missed it...luckily, I married someone with a much better memory than myself. For some reason, I thought I planted tomatoes at the beginning of April last year, but no, my husband was right, it was March 1! Luckily, he kept nagging me to check, and I had recorded it on my blog. Yesterday was a perfect sunny, warm, not windy day for planting tomatoes.
This year, I convinced my husband to label all the tomatoes he planted. Last year, I labelled the ones I planted, but he didn't label his. He has a good memory, but last year he forgot which was which and this year we planted 112 of 18 different varieties, so there is no way anyone would remember.
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Small tomato varieties include: jelly bean (red and yellow), sugar lump, black plum, chadwick's cherry, gold currant, sweet orange II, reisentraube. The last 5 are from seeds left over from last year, so we don't know if they will come up.
We also planted a grape tomato herein known as "jiichan (grandpa) tomato." This was our first attempt at tomato seed saving. Last year was a terrible year for tomatoes in Gifu. Most of ours didn't survive the summer and those that did, didn't produce very well. However, my father-in-law had one kind of grape tomato (he doesn't remember what kind he bought) that not only survived, but thrived and produced bushels of tomatoes. Okay, I admit, I don't know how much a bushel is, but he gave us two supermarket bags full a week from August until the end of November. They were very tasty, and were known in our house as "jiichan tomato".
Regular tomato varieties include: Cherokee Purple, Costoluto Genovese, Mortgage Lifter (I admit I got this one for the name), Money Maker (this was my favorite last year, but I only had 2 seeds, 1 plant, 2 tomatoes, but they were SOO good). Also seeds left over from last year: Black Krim, Marmande Super, Big Rainbow, Evergreen and Brandywine.
Two types of zucchini, Black Beauty (same as last year), and a new type for us, Lebanese Light Green.
4 comments:
ooohhh already? Is it not snowing buckets today? I need to plant up my seeds but I need to wait for the snow to clear first....
And labelling= very good idea! I didn't label my green tomatoes last year and spent half the season waiting for them to ripen!
Wow - that's a lot of tomatoes! I have planted a few already too - perhaps if they do well this year I can swap a few seeds with you next year. Do you read the "down to earth" blog? She has just written a great article about planting tomato seeds... http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/
Good luck with the seedlings!
labeling- The girls do their bit by making sure we have enough popsicle sticks!
A seed swap would be great. I think we need to work on our seed saving technique a bit. I will definitely check out "down to earth". Thanks for the suggestion!
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