Gone Feral In Idaho

These guys have been grafted ( the ones with the clips) with no light so that they could heal. Obviously the one center right didn't work. We lost two. But the rest are doing well. I added some light to help them grow and I'll post updates on the progress. Thanks to Kyle, he kept them going while I was out of town for a few days. 

I personally won't be using a box cutter, a sharp razor blade sounds safer. This year I will try a new method for growing tomatoes. We garden in two raised beds and crop rotation is difficult. We've been loosing plants early due to disease and replacing the soil is not an option for us. Extreme heat is also a problem and grafting can help with that.  Here is the Johnny's seed PDF on the process . It is a bit intimidating, but tomato seedlings are very resilient and I'm confident I can pull it off.  Of course I have to garden nerd this thing out, so I'll be growing non-grafted and grafted plants to compare the results. 

I got these seeds from Baker Creek Rare Seeds, but no longer see this variety on the website. My seed packets are long packed away for next winter. From what I remember it is a German wandering tomato. It is multi-lobed like a bunch of fused cherry tomatoes. This one seems a little small, but is much firmer than the first one I picked. I'm waiting for Kyle to get home to try it.  stem end, strange, but not crazy blossom end, crazy

 The bicycle planter is filling out The tomato plant on the left is officially over my head. We'll need a ladder to harvest the ones from the top. The tomato "pergolas" are getting set up. We grow single vine tomatoes. Every sucker gets removed to leave only one vine. This style of growing them has worked well for us in the past.   Yes, another shot of "Indigo Rose". They are hard as rocks, so no ripe ones yet. Once they get soft I'll give them a gentle twist each day until they gently break off.  The Japanese Black Trifele plants look like they are going to produce tons. These were listed as determinate, so we are growing two vines on each plant. This is Red Zebra, you can already see the stripes. These are the Green Zebra's.

Our two new beds aren't very secluded. There is actually a bus stop about 50 feet away near our back yard. We can't gaze upon our veggie garden from any windows in the house. But what I have found is that I interact with the people of the neighborhood a lot more than I typically would. I tend the gardens daily, so there is always someone walking/riding/driving by. A lot of people stop for a small chat.   We are in an odd part of town. There are lots of suburban tract homes (like ours) and then a mix of older construction from when the area used to be the real sticks. It is a really nice feel of country (mind you, I'm from Chicago) and not too suburban to urban. We have several horses chickens, farm geese, and a lama that live down the street.   Anywhoo, I hope the odd nature of some of our tomatoes can strike up some conversations this summer. Yes I'm fascinated with the Indigo Roses.  The view out back. The vines are still striving to reach new height...

Indigo Rose blue tomato. Wow, these are strangely wonderful.  Yellow Pear, our first year of these as well.  One of our two huge urn plantings. Inside is a self watering container setup. These have a few more surprises yet to grow.  Our first echinacea, or cone flower. I love these.

 The view from the patio is pretty nice right now. One day we'll have proper patio furniture.  This year I grew 10 different tomatoes. This is Indigo Rose a "blue" tomato. The plant itself is pretty blue and you can see where the sun hits the skin it also turns blue.  All the plants are flowering now. The alliums are kaput and I'll cut them down this weekend. The bicycle planter is starting to take off with the summer planting.

The wildfire smoke has been horrible this year, the worst in my 10+ years in Boise. The heat has been pretty bad as well. At least its a dry heat? Walter Pagels  First multiple bloom on the pink lily  Multi-colored tomatoes Tomato pergola in full swing

We got our first tomato harvest on Sunday. These are (not quite ripe) White Queens, Honey Bunch, and an Egg Yolk. Since then we've gotten a few Pearly Pinks and a Black Cherry, but I ate them before getting pictures. I turned them into a little salad by cutting them up, lightly salting in a colander to get extra moisture out, then tossed them with oregano, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. This is one of my favorite ways to eat tomatoes. My other fave is with a few drops of truffle oil, basil, and fresh mozzarella. To me cucumber salad and tomato salad are the epitome of the taste of summer. Forget hamburgers, home grown tomatoes with a few simple ingredients are the best on a hot day. I also had the bright idea of building a tomato pergola. We knew the plants would reach far above their 6' stakes, so we made a trellis for them to grow across before we cut off the growing tips in about a month. So far I am keeping all my tomatoes pruned to only two vines per plant and ...

pearly pink tomato The tomato plants will go outside this weekend. About 3/4 of the plants are forming blooms that I first noticed today. This was day three in the new position at work and it was way less hectic and I was good and went to bed early the night before so today's post work routine went much more like I've wanted than Monday and Tuesday when I came home pretty much exhausted.  I even made the new schedule a day before my original goal (boring office people stuff right there, let me tell ya, but I am thrilled with it). So today was the first day this week where I've had the energy and awareness to really check out the plants. A nice leisurely stroll with Sadie was awesome as well. I let her have lots of sniffing time so she could really check out whats been going on in the hood. I must say, I wasn't much fun for her Monday and Tuesday.  white queen with possible megabloom Tomorrow marks another full trip around the sun for me. Each trip seems s...

Here's the 2012 grow-op.  I just re-potted some maters into bigger pots, burying them up to their necks. The fan helps build strong stems and keeps fungus gnats away. We had a plant full of them that I got rid of, but the damn things keep popping up. Fungus gnats look a bit like fruit flies, but they love to lay eggs in the soil of houseplants and will eat the root structure, often stunting a plants growth, but usually killing baby seedlings if there numbers are high enough. This is the first real harvest of the season. These are collards and broccoli we planted back in October that were in hoop houses. I'm not dead set on doing it again next fall, but we do have a lot of garlic coming up, so maybe we'll focus on that next time.  Here is Sadie posing with my new bargain find. I plan to bring it to Vegas for my first International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners conference in June.  It will be 5 years in November that I started with the Coroner's office. I...