Thursday, July 9, 2009

Insane tomato plants

Okay, so it's been a while since we've had a garden. We moved here 2 years ago and didn't plant tomatoes the year we moved. And this year is our first with an actual garden plot. I don't know how, but I seemed to have forgotten just how much space they take up. Especially the heirloom varieties. Yikes.

Our pastor gave me 2 heirloom plants. A Brandywine and a Bear Claw (which may be a Brandywine variety). Gosh are they huge now. The Bear Claw one is a droopy plant by nature, it seems, but it also grabs onto anything it can. It was into the Brandywine, and had reached over the peppers to get into the San Marzano tomato plants. I had to cut off an entire productive branch just to manage the thing. Then I cut out all of the suckers and now there is light reaching the interior of the bush again. I figure I have a good half hour of trimming still to get all of the tomato plants under control. Note to self... plant them further apart next year!!! And take pictures when they first go in. Crazy.

The green beans have been more or less overtaken by the tomatoes, but no matter, since the local bunnies seem to enjoy nibbling on any new shoot that appears anyway. Which so far is distracting them from the strawberry plants. We'll see what happens when they begin to fruit.

It'll take a while before the raspberries yield anything of worth, but that's fine. Root growth is good. In a few years I'll be making raspberry pies without breaking the bank! Just like my grandmother did.

So I guess this fall we'll be expanding the garden.

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