This year’s garden

Well, since last year’s single Black Krim seedling brought us much happiness, and supplied about 1/2 of our tomato needs for the months it was bearing ripe fruit, we did the logical thing, and planted 6 tomato plants this year.

So, in order of predicted fruit-bearing, assuming we manage to keep them alive until they bear fruit, you can expect to see tomato recipes featuring:

• Early Girl — 50-65 days from transplantation.
• Sweet 100 — 65 days from transplantation.
• Better Boy Tomato — 75 days from transplantation. And, the Guiness world record holder for weight of tomato fruit produced from one plant. I can’t wait!
• Black Krim — the favorite from last year returns again. 75-80 days from transplantation. But worth every one of ’em.
• Mr. Stripey — 80 days from transplantation. I mean, really, with a name like that, how could we resist?
• Beefmaster — 80 days from transplation. The logic from Mr. Stripey controls, clearly.

To go with these, we also planted an expanded herb box containing 6 basil plants, lemon thyme, rosemary, italian oregano, and marjoram.

In honor of our vacation, we’re trying our hand at 1 Japanese cucumber plant.

And, in honor of E’s southern roots, we planted okra, from seeds (but of course, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, so we planted, literally, 10 seed-filled indentations with 1-4 seeds each, and it’ll be a miracle if we manage to raise one to a fruit-bearing plant.) After the planting was done, E read the packet to see we were supposed to soak the seeds for 24 hours before planting. We decided post-planting soaking was the best way to remedy this mistake and watered accordingly. So yeah… I’ll report back on that one. I’d say that at this point, one fruit-bearing plant would be a success, and none would not, necessarily, be a failure, since we couldn’t possibly plant the whole seed packet and the winner might still be in there.

So yeah. It’s good to be home. I’m excited about summer harvest.