Get Growing
Craig Sailor is the Arts & Entertainment editor at The News Tribune. Last year he planted his first vegetable garden. Focusing on unusual varieties, “Freak of Nature” returns for 2008 with a new crop of uncommon vegetables and flowers. This year he’ll try yin yang beans, giant pumpkins, blue poppies and mutant sunflowers. He gardens at his North End Tacoma home and sneaks seeds in to his mother’s garden at Willapa Bay when she’s not looking. E-mail him at craig.sailor@thenewstribune.com.

Sue Kidd is the Lifestyle Editor at The News Tribune and the ringleader for the Home&Garden section. She is a decent vegetable gardener, but occasionally a tragic mess at growing other stuff. She’ll blog about gardening events, gadgets, her weird obsession with guerrilla gardening and all her assorted garden disasters. E-mail her with thoughts/rants/questions/bizarre observations. sue.kidd@thenewstribune.com.

More gardening blogs:
Greengirl
"Starting seeds, dreading weeds."

You Grow Girl
"Gardening for the people."

Between Plow and Wood
"Meditations on farming, nature, food, art, sustainability, the environment and rural living."

Downtown Tomatoes
"A gardening club for the rest of us."

Calendar
July 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
 << < Current> >>
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Archives
XML Feeds
What is RSS?
Misc
Who's Online?
  • BORNHAWK
  • CDHawkFan Email
  • kamieniecki Email
  • artman77 Email
  • Guest Users: 389
A Gardening Blog
Friday, July 11th, 2008
Posted by Craig Sailor @ 11:16:40 am

I finally have all my tomatoes in the ground: some planned and some by accident.

The photo shows a variety called glacier that seems well on its way to being my first crop. To the right of it is one of my momotaros that I grew from seed in my bathtub. It's a little stunted. OK, a lot stunted.

In addition to those, I'm growing striped roman, brandywine, sun sugar, sweet 100's and white current. I bought those, along with the glacier, as starts. All are new to me except the brandywine (big, red, flavor-packed) and sun sugars (orange cherries).

And then there are the mystery tomatoes. Half a dozen volunteers have sprung up, the descendants of last year's crop. I considered pulling them...but couldn't. I'm just too curious to see what they turn out to be. The demoralizing part: they are all bigger than the momotaros that I grew from seed.

From now on I'll leave growing tomatoes from seed to the professionals - and Mother Nature.

Categories: Tomatoes