Wednesday, June 5, 2013

2013 Tomato Planting

Thanks to generous Campbell Garden Sponsors, garden volunteers planted tomatoes and peppers in our Harvest Sharing Garden on May 19th.
Black Gold donated organic fertilizer to help our plants thrive!

Hansen Family Farm is sponsoring our tomato garden again this year by giving us 20 tomato plants and 14 pepper plants. The Hansen's grow an amazing assortment of veggie starts for sale at the Milwaukie Farmers Market on Sundays and at the Oregon City Farmers Market on Saturdays.

While mid-May was still a little early for setting tomato and other warm weather plants directly out into the garden (they really prefer warmer weather), thanks to the generous donation of greenhouse plastic from Naomi's Organic Farm Supply and metal hoops from Family Table Farm, we were able to tuck our tomatoes and peppers into a warm cloche. We will keep the plastic on until the temperatures are consistently warm and the threat of severe rains are past.

We learned a lot in our first year growing veggies to donate through our Harvest Sharing Program. Unusual colored tomatoes didn't go over well with many of our harvest recipients; we would often find the brownish or purplish tomatoes left in the previous weeks donation box; and those colored tomatoes were harder for some of our volunteer pickers to determine ripeness of, resulting in a few tomatoes left to spoil on the vines. This year we are concentrating on growing round, red tomatoes, with just a few colored ones thrown in for variety. Split resistant varieties that will hold up while being transported are important; . Christie Hansen helped us pick out the tomato varieties to grow. See the list below:
Tomatoes
New Yorker
Stupice
Tomatoes and peppers tucked into a cloche.
Yellow Pear
Valley Girl
Dark Orange Muscat
Sweet Million
Snow White
Rutgers
Green Zebra
Momotoro
Taxi

Peppers
California Wonder
Anaheim
Marconi Red
Roumanian Rainbow
Wisconsin Lakes
Jaloro
Early Jalapeno
Serrano
Wenk’s Yellow Hot


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