Sunny Weather Makes An Encore

I spent the glorious weather yesterday doing some much needed long term work on the back of the house. I ripped up a BUNCH of sod to expand the size of the beds along the northern fence line. With the added square footage I'll be able to move a bunch of plants to the new space and re-arrange things to make the whole yard easier to maintain. I'll also be increasing the space I'm devoting to gardening by at least a third and I can now pretty reliably grow tomatoes, onions, garlic and spinach. I'll be experimenting with Swiss Chard this month (and anything else that doesn't mind being planted in October.)

I also harvested my onions and tomatoes. The onions this year were a bust as I expected, though I did pull ten pounds. The upside is that what I pulled will become the starters for next year's crop. So, they'll be going BACK into the ground in a couple of days, along with some some seeds I'll be planting just to see how growing onions from seed works.

I had expected the tomatoes to be something of a disappointment on account of the wonky weather we've had all year. Surprisingly, I had a fairly reasonable harvest of 15 pounds of red tomatoes and 10 pounds of green tomatoes. The red tomatoes are already mellowing their way into red sauce on my stove top. I'm going to try and turn the greens into tomato relish or something.

So, in the end I got about the same poundage (25 lbs. vs. 30 lbs.) of tomatoes from eight plants as I got from six healthy and three "blossom rot" afflicted plants last year. Of course, 2/5 of this year's poundage is in the form of green tomatoes so technically my yield was a lot lower. It all depends on whether or not I can transform the greens into something useful.

Next year I'll be going back to real tomato cages and giving the plants more room. Something on the order of two square feet per plant. I suspect I'll get much higher yields doing it this way. I still need to figure out how to handle Roma's growth tendencies. It seems like a combination of pruning and vertical support is key.

As for the "blossom rot" there's no sign of it this year. I don't really know what made the difference. I have started amending the soil with Gypsum to provide additional calcium and that could have helped. It's also entirely possible that some random factor that caused the blossom rot last year didn't happen this year.