Tomato

I have the day off of work so, after waking up around the time I'd usually be leaving for work, I was able to get some easy chores done and treat myself to a long bike ride, a cup of good coffee on the corner of our main thoroughfare uptown, some antique store perusing, and bike shop gawking...

Back home, almost as quickly as I sat down to the computer to check my blogroll, I noticed that Colin at Seattle Urban Farm Co. had posted literally only minutes before about pruning tomato plants. Great luck!

Our four tomato plants have been on my worry list for a little while now. Up until this past week, I still didn't know which plants were my "paste" tomatoes and which were my "salsa" tomatoes--believe me, there will be a difference between them--due to a little mix-up in the transplanting process... Ooops. Fruit has been growing for a couple weeks, but only a few days ago did the fruits start growing slightly differently on two of the plants--which was a relief to know we would have two of each variety, rather than three of one and one of the other... Garden drama.

The plants are getting huge and the two salsa plants appear to be very "indeterminate"--meaning that instead of just growing up as one massive stem with some smaller fruit-bearing branches, they put out some huge lateral stems that grow out then up so you end up having this crazy 4-foot wide bush of tomatoes and it gets out of control. So, despite my attempts to constantly tuck these branches into the metal cages, the branches were content to grow out, beyond the garden bed, and lay in the grass, disregarding both the mower and Alden's penchant for eating plants.

Ok. I open my blog, scan through my list of favorite blogs, and notice SUFCo wrote about the importance of pruning tomatoes. Bingo. I was out the door quicker than you could shake a stick at something, dismembering the lowest branches and anything that looked like it should be destroyed. It was a blood bath. I suspect it's a little late in the growing season to be butchering plants as I did, but I figure the plants were screwed if I left them on, so what's the harm? Best case scenerio is the fruit will be sweeter and come in smaller quantities so we won't be overburdened like last year...