How our garden grows (week 6)

How our garden grows

 

Week 6

 

Our garden is mostly planted and off to a fabulous start!  We want to share a few planting tips with you, show you how to trellis tomatoes, and let ya have a look at  how our garden is growing 🙂

 

We talked about “hardening off” your plants when you bring them home from the green house or if you start them from seeds, they have to acclimatize before planting.  Once you’ve taken them in at night for a few days they’ll be ready to be plant.

An important aspect of gardening is making sure the soil has the essential nutrients it needs for plants to grow.  We use the fertilizer by Mitleider  called Mitleider Magic.  There are two parts to the mix. One you apply at the beginning of the growing season when you prep the beds before you plant (Preplant Mix) and one you apply weekly or bi-weekly as the garden is growing. The mix has all the micro-nutrients and if you are in an area you cannot purchase it premade then you can go to www.growfood.com and get the formula to mix it up yourself. We are lucky in that our local farm stores carry it. We just follow the directions on the packaging.

When using the Mitlieder method to grow your trellising plants, the plants are much closer together than would normally be allowed.  This allows for smaller production per plant but much larger over all production.  In the square foot gardening method, for example, one tomato plant would take four square feet… in a non intensive garden a tomato plant might take 9 square feet to grow. With the Mittleider method which we use for our climbing and vining crops we plant one tomato plant every six to eight inches, for example.

When planting your tomatoes, it’s good to use a trench method and bury most of the stem with the roots.  You want to remove any small leaves along the bottom of the stem.  The stem of a tomato plant will grow roots and give the plant an extra strong foundation.

Dig a trench big enough to lay the roots and most of the tomato stem in…

Cover with dirt, leaving the top of the seedling above ground…

Make sure the top of the plant is under neath the trellis it’s going to grow up…

As I said… using the Mitleider method you plant tomatoes 6 inches apart, if you don’t take care of your plants and they’re planted this close together… you’ll end up with a big mess! When these little tomato plants are big enough to reach the trellis THEN it’s time to start training them.

{Fast forward 2 weeks}

So, NOW that their big enough to reach the trellis…what needs to happen is to spend a few minutes “suckering” your tomatoes a couple of times a week.  The idea is that you maintain one and possibly 2 leader stems with no other sucker/branch stems.

As you train your leader stem up the trellis, loosely attach it to the trellis with plant ties made out of velcro, just cut about a 2 inch piece of velcro and wrap around the trellis where you want it to stay.

As the tomatoes continue to grow we’ll keep suckering them and weaving them back and forth through and up the trellis. 

NOW, for a look at the rest of our garden!  Our spinach and other greens are ready to start harvesting!!  We’ll have to enjoy them quick because when it gets too hot they’ll be killed off 🙁

AND this is a picture of our salsa garden… it has everything you’ll need to make homemade salsa!  Tomatoes in the back, onions in the center, and several different varieties of peppers in the front! Once all those vegetables are closer to maturing we’ll plant the cilantro because it quickly goes to seed and then it becomes coriander!

Well, that about does it for this week of How our garden grows! 

Love,

Ruthie