Setting myself up for a tomato glut

Every year I vow that I will restrain myself with tomato plants. And I do — sort of — when it comes time to put them in a raised bed. But I am less restrained when it comes to starting seeds. After all, you never know what will germinate and what will flop, right? (And last year, the Brit pushed for using up all those Sungold seeds…) So I usually find myself foisting plants on colleagues and/or appropriating space in a neighbor’s bed.

This year could be at least as bad.

In the quest to use up many of the seeds we have so that I can justify those blue indigo tomatoes next year, I have planted 27 plugs, each with a few seeds because, hey, they’re old so will they all germinate? If they all do, I’ll end up with close to 100 plants — probably enough for the entire neighborhood! But that’s a problem for another day, to sort of borrow a phrase from Scarlett O’Hara. In the meantime, I think (hope?) I’ve found a good way to keep track of all of them at least until it’s time to transplant them into bigger containers.

The good part is that I did use up a lot of the seeds. And that if it all flops, it’s early enough that I can start another round. The bad part is that I still have quite a few, though the variety is much more manageable for that second round. I didn’t even touch the unopened pouch of black cherry tomatoes, which was a tough thing to do. And maybe I’ll find someone who’ll swap a Sungold or a Sunsugar (even sweeter) for one of mine.

Even if I can’t pull off that last part, I could have quite the colorful tomato salad, with nearly a dozen types of tomatoes. The assortment includes plenty of Brandywines (two different gifts of seeds), an orange variety, yellow plum, yellow cherry, a chocolate stripe and more.

And heck, if I’m going to get my fingers all dirty and start a heat mat, I might as well try some other seeds. So the last of a pack of miniscule alyssum seeds is planted, as is half a pack of white nicotiana that I hope will add a wonderful scent to the deck on a summer’s evening.

Next round: Basil? Salad greens?

A winter-sowing experiment

Two days of sunshine and temperatures that hit 50! And on a weekend! Yes, more snow is possible tonight and later in the week, but for now, after this brutal winter, I am thinking spring and the garden.

Not that I can really see much green. The snow, while melting, is still deep, the raised beds are covered and the crocuses are nowhere to be seen. The river behind us? Sprawling from all the runoff.

So naturally I planted seeds. Seeds that desperately needed to be used and which I had forgotten to plant in years past. I took some plastic containers that once contained candied ginger, dried cranberries and greens (not all together!) that I had been stockpiling for too long with the intent of turning them into mini-greenhouses. Following the instructions here, I slashed drainage holes, filled with soil, watered deeply, added seeds, slashed air vents … and left them in the snow on top of a raised bed. The idea is that the seeds will germinate as the cold ends and the plants know it’s safe to come up. It will then be up to me to water them as needed and open their air vents more and more.

One container is full of Texas hummingbird sage, which promises lovely red flowers and hopefully a stream of hummingbirds. Another is borage, and then there’s mullein and tall fernleaf fiddleneck. The last has half a packet of butterfly weed, whose orange flowers appeal to me as well as to butterflies. I’ll aim to to spread the rest in April, when light frosts are still possible, because the packet says it develops a long taproot and therefore doesn’t transplant well. Just to hedge my bets.

And with that, five of our many seed packets are used up.

One of this year’s goals is to use more of what we have. So no blue indigo tomatoes until next year.