Planting tomatoes in 2011
Tomato planting day is one of
my favorite annual events, but it's also fraught with a lot of second
guessing. Last year, I had very good luck spacing my
tomatoes further apart (which meant setting out fewer of them ---
21 instead of 37) and pruning
them heavily, so
this year I'll be continuing that trend. I slipped 22 of the
heftiest transplants I've ever grown into the ground on Monday,
watering them in well to make up for the scorching heat.
Every
year, I grow fewer slicers and tommy-toes and more romas. In
2010, I was down to 8 non-romas, and this year I only put in 5, which
feels like very few until I remind myself that they only need to keep
us in fresh tomatoes over the summer. I had planned to put in 6
non-romas, but our delicious Japanese
Black Trifele seems to have carried blight spores in its seeds, so I
quickly culled all of the affected plants. That gave me space to
upgrade to 17 romas in hopes of socking away even more sauce, dried
tomatoes, and ketchup for the winter.
I put most of our
tomatoes in one long, new bed running along the south side of the
chicken pasture. This is the very sunniest spot in the garden,
and I figure I can use the fence (with some extra posts) to train the
tomatoes upright and keep them drier than ever 
before.
In our very wet climate, dry is what tomatoes crave, and we love them
enough to give them prime real estate in the garden. I had
actually hoped to make the bed a little longer, but two solid months of
wet, wet, wet has reduced me to scraping away at the last remnants of horse
manure compost, so
the new tomato bed ended rather abruptly when the manure gave
out. If nature smiles on us and we're able to drive the truck out
this week, I'll add another ten feet of tomato bed and throw in some
more roma seeds to increase our planting --- maybe this winter we'll
have enough dried tomatoes that they don't have to be a once a month
treat?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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The 7-Day forecast says thunderstorms, thunderstorms, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain so I'm going to try and get my transplants out today before it starts.
It sounds like you have a great plan for your toms. Good luck this year!
Everett
You can even clone them right in the garden and save a step. I just pop off a piece the size of a sweet potato slip and plant it with at least 6" of the stem under the soil (and a couple leaves showing). They start out wilty and sad and suddenly a new plant pops up.
I loved this blog post -- sounds so familiar!