TOMATO GARDEN UPDATE

When I purchased the tomato cages several weeks ago and installed them in the tomato garden, they looked huge.  The little tomato plants were only about 18 inches tall and looked swallowed up by the 52" cage.  My neighbor also commented that he thought the cages looked big.  

Apparently not.  I've got lots of little flowers, and since I added bone meal, I hope to get lots of tomatoes! 

 

On another note, I finally got around to starting a dozen or so older onion sets three weeks ago but something got into the pots a couple nights later and dug them all out.  I'm guessing it was  mamma raccoon and her three little ones.  They also dug out a few of my aloe plants that I had divided up.   I was able to salvage the aloe, but not the onions.  So...I've started onion seeds.  Plus some green beans, black eyed peas and butter beans.  I haven't had the best luck with my seed starting.  I thought that last group would do better since I moved my seed starting operation to the back yard.  I set up a piece of plywood on a couple sawhorses under the pecan tree and organized my pots and bags of soil beneath them.  I could see them from my kitchen window.  But I guess not, so I've moved my seed starting back to the driveway just in front of the house under a tree.  I've had 5-6 pots on top of a low platform I had first set up for seed starting and the raccoons have left them alone so far.  Assuming the onions sprout, as soon as they are a couple inches high, I'll cut out the bottom of the little pots and slide the whole thing into the bed in the back yard (the one that had the run-away tomatoes last summer).  This bed gets sun from about 11am through 5pm, so I'm hoping it won't be too hot.  Our forecast for this next week is near 100 degrees all week, and this is just the first half of July.  How strange would it look to have a shade cloth over it...

Update: I have a tomato!!! I believe it is a Rutgers, it's just about an inch in diameter right now.  YEA!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have fallen behind on adding posts to my blog - my two part time jobs have kept me really busy.  I will try to get back to posting something at least once a week.  Until then, never give up, never surrender, and may all your dreams come true.

 

Yum, Smells Good!
 
I have an idea for a couple new perfume scents.

I check on my tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum) every day ("Patience" is not my middle name) and as I brush against the leaves or gently move them back inside their cages, I get a wonderful aroma wafting up to me.  And every time I think to myself  'there should be a perfume with this scent". 

The second perfume would be from basil flowers (Ocimum basilicum), a rather obvious one.  About 15 years ago I worked at a history museum and we put in a vegetable garden appropriate to the 1800s log house on the property.  We had basil plants with beautiful little flowers on the stem ends.  I would pinch them off to encourage the plant to become more bushy and rather than throw away the pretty flowers I brought them in to my office and put them in a little bowl on my desk.  The aroma from them was absolutely delicious! 

I'd call the tomato leaf perfume SolaLyco, and the basil flower perfume OciMumba.  So now I just need to find out if Channel or Hermés would be interested in developing them...

I'll have more on my tomato plants in my next post.

Until then, never give up, never surrender, and may all your dreams come true.