Winners and Tomato Stakes

June 27, 2011

Thank you so much for all the comments on the new pattern makeovers!  I loved hearing what everyone is sewing too.  It was so fun to hear about all the handmade activity happening out there!  I used the True Random Number Generator and it gave me numbers 18, 8, & 28!  So the winners are these awesome readers…

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The Love Your Lunch Box is next is a few weeks so you'll have a chance again soon!

Since I can't make a post ONLY about the winners, I decided to tell you all about my tomatoes!  Nothing too exciting but I have been trying a different method the last couple of years and wanted to share it with you all.  I used to always use cages with my tomato plants but now I have switched to stakes.

Tomatostakes
 This is the old timers method and I am liking it.  My favorite part is pinching off the suckers.  Do you know about the suckers?  You can train your tomato to grow up a stake only if you pinch off the shoot that grows between the main stalk and each leaf stem that comes off the main stalk.

Tomatosuckers
Unfortunately I pinched all my suckers this morning so I couldn't show you one in action but above is what they look like AFTER you pinch them off.  It's so fun to stand up there in your garden early in the morning, look for suckers, pinch off and then have that wonderful tomato plant smell on your finger tips.  That sounds pretty wierd, but if you love growing tomatoes, you hear what I am saying, right?  When you grow with cages, you just have to wait until the fruits get red to start interacting with your tomatoes but with this method, you are doing something with them every week!  I love it.

I wasn't much of a student in science class but I do have 1 control tomato growing in a cage…

Tomatocage
I know you all are on pins and needles waiting to see which plants will bear better fruit!  The cage one is a grape tomato though so maybe this experiment is already flawed???  We are growing lots of other things in the garden this year.  The deer have been brutal though!  Travis and the kids made a scarecrow for me.

Scarecrow
Isn't it beautiful?  Especially his old hockey helmet in the crabbing net.  Awesome!  There is also a transistor radio playing in a plastic bag in the helmet.  The neighbor dogs are totally freaked out by this guy!  Another new addition last year was kholrabi which is super easy to grow and so yummy in salads right out of the garden.  It looks cool growing in your garden too.  

Kholrabi
Does anyone else have new things growing in their garden?  

 

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