Hi! Mike’s been updating you on the rest of the garden, but today I have a long overdue post about our pepper and tomato plants. 😀
A few weeks ago, we had a stretch of days that were 80˚F or hotter, which is unseasonably warm for this area, so we decided to go ahead and plant some tomatoes and peppers on May 11.
We had one row of space left in between the lettuce and the onions. Here’s what this row of space looked like a few weeks ago, before the lettuce decided to grow in leaps and bounds.
I planted the habanero at the top of the row, and the bell pepper right next to it. We got a little trellis thing that we will eventually tie the bell pepper to, to help it support itself, but for now I just placed it nearby so it will be ready when the plant starts to need support.
Then I planted the two dwarf tomatoes on the bottom of the row. These will hopefully not need support, since they are supposed to grow to be more bush-like. My grandma mentioned that they might have been happier growing in a container, so something to consider for next year. It would be fun to have a little container garden with tomato varieties! 😀
Naturally, the next day it started getting cooler and rainy again, but the plants have been doing well so far! They are definitely getting crowded out by some of the bigger, more established plants. Next year we will have a second set of raised beds, so we can plan out the layout a bit better. This year has been mostly a grand experiment. :3
The Sleeping Lady tomato already has a few flowers on it, but the Geranium Kiss variety seems a little less happy. Either way, it definitely looks like they’ve grown a bit in the past few weeks.
We’ve started harvesting some of the lettuce and onions, but there is so much here! As Mike mentioned in his post, next year we will have to stagger the planting a bit more. But it’s been fun to be able to eat the first vegetables from our garden this year! 😀
I’ve had good results growing tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets built into “self watering” containers.