Growing Food: Musical Milk Jugs

Last Friday was tomato day! Yippee! We finally got the right weather to plant the tomatoes out. They were actually a little bigger than I would typically have them still inside, but I needed a day that wasn't too hot or windy. Also a day I wasn't working.

Ready to spread their wings and fly. Or rather, spread their leaves and grow. 

I don't harden off my seedlings, meaning gradually acclimate them to the vagaries of outdoor conditions after a lifetime of temperature control. Frankly, I'm not good at this. I tend to forget about them outside and they get too cold or fried in the sun, or something. I prefer to let the milk jugs shelter them and create a stable environment right off the bat.

All of the milk jugs had already been removed from the cabbages and kohlrabi:

And replaced by the small walls.

I can re-use the milk jugs as many times as I wish, but only for one season. After that, the plastic gets too brittle and they break when I push them into the soil.

I was left with about a dozen jugs ready to go. I had 26 tomato plants, so I sawed the bottoms off 14 more milk jugs while A. dug the bed for me. After hoeing and raking the bed smooth, and then building up the earth berms all around it to hold in the water, I flooded it.

And then, after the water soaked in, I could finally plant. Plants in the mud, milk jugs firmly anchored over the top, and . . .

The jugs go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah . . .

I had two more plants than I had thought I did, so the bed ended up a little crowded, but that's okay. Makes it easier to mulch and water them.

We haven't quite figured out staking yet. With this configuration, we could put cattle panels in the middle and tie the plants to that, but that would require buying more cattle panels, and I always find tying tomatoes to be much easier on individual stakes. A. got some cedar pieces for me that he's going to try to split into stakes, so we'll see how that goes.

I didn't stake my tomatoes last year, which was fine insofar as they don't rot here, thanks to our dry climate, but it's a mess of vines and hard to find the tomatoes. Staking is a lot of work, but I like it better.

Next step for the tomatoes is putting in the stakes--I learned early in my gardening life that I should do this when the plants are as small as possible--and mulching with the waste sheep hay that's right on the other side of the fence from the tomato bed.

Oh, I forgot to tell you what tomatoes I'm growing! Thirteen of those plants are Romas, and then the other half are Stupice, Cherokee Purple, and Chocolate Cherry. 

Anything exciting happening in your garden lately, fellow gardeners?