Previously: Garden planning 2021, 5
It's tomato time:
- Ivan (Victory Gardeners)
- Cherokee Purple (Victory Gardeners)
- Isis Candy (Seed Savers)
- Amish Paste (Seed Savers)
- White Tomesol (Baker Creek)
- Brandywine Pink (Burpee)
Jiffy pots came in the mail this week. Everything is a little slow because we live in viral times, but I'm not going to complain—let things take as long as they take. Besides, I didn't really have much time to get things planted until this week.
One other problem: the winter was so warm (relative to winter, etc.), I didn't build any shelving in the basement because I could work outside on the wall-that-never-ends. I'm going to move these things down into the basement, but the lights aren't set up. I'm just going to throw some 2x4s on top of some sawhorses and just clamp the lights to that. Good enough for Gilson.
I selected these tomatoes for a variety of reasons:
- Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, and Isis Candy are on the Missouri Botanical Garden's list of recommended varieties of heirloom vegetables for St. Louis
- Ivan has a really interesting story of getting saved from abandonment
- We had some leftover Brandywine Pink from last year, and those crazy things grew over 2 meters tall before they ran out of supports to grow on (and then kept growing up and over and down)
- Baker Creek threw in the White Tomesol as a freebie with my order so, OK, plant it
I was thisclose to not planting tomatoes this year because they're a pain to grow, especially in clay soil, but a packet of seeds is about the same cost as a big heirloom tomato right now so I guess I can justify the work. It would have been nice to get the soil ready to go before planting season, but we'll do the best we can this year and then chop everything and drop it on the ground for next year.
