first tomato
With great excitement I want to present to you the first tomato of the year! Supersweet 100, I can’t believe how productive these little cherry tomato hybrids are. This particular plant sprouted from the seeds of the fruit that fell on the ground last year.
I found plants all over the garden and they are twice as big as the the ones I started from seed indoors.
It is true that this cultivar is a very unruly plant. If you think the beans are sprawling out of control, try indeterminate tomatoes. Their chords grow indefinitely if you don’t pinch them. I also neglected to prune the water shoots, so their multiple side branches grew into a little jungle of leaves and fruit.
Tomatoes are unpretentious plants and will grow anywhere if they have a lot of sunlight and a good supply of water. Water their feet, not their leaves to avoid creating favorable conditions for black spot. Like all vegetables they are hungry plants and need constant fertilization to keep healthy and yield a lot. Tomatoes are perfectly happy with heavy soils, by all means use the clay patch that is so rich in nutrients.
If your soil is poor and the plants look pale and sickly, add a good dressing of compost or organic fertilizer. Some gardeners, myself included, swear by coffee grounds, which are very rich in nitrogen. This is the regimen that boosted last year’s production. It is true that coffee grounds raise the acidity of the soil, but tomatoes aren’t bothered by that.
This year courtesy of very mild weather all vegetables developed a little sooner; this first tomato is not the first produce of the year. The honor really went to the runner beans, followed promptly by the cucumbers. Tomatoes however have a privileged position in the veggie garden, so I had to mark this moment for the Home Farming Project.
Pretty soon I will be able to add produce to the yield table and I’m very much looking forward to that.
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