Podcast #79 – Do We Need 80 Tomato Plants?


Actually, it’s 80 or so planted on Veg Hill, but we have another 20 or so in pots on the deck that didn’t make it (or at least haven’t yet made it) into the soil. How did our tomatoes get so out of control?

More than anything else, it’s probably a reaction to last year’s spotty harvest, when we had to battle the voracious tomato hornworms to get any fruit at all. And of course, there’s the inexplicable love of the Farmer-in-Chief for Cherokee Purple tomatoes. In this week’s podcast, we talk about what we hope to learn from all these tomatoes we’ve planted, what we’re using as companion plants, how we’re preparing the soil differently, how we’re planting them differently, how we will trellis them, and our plans for shadecloth in the brutal summer heat. Also: our continuing strawberry harvest, as well as the blackberries and blueberries coming on for May and June.

tomato-for-blog1

Listen – 20:18

(Yet) Another Way to Trellis Tomatoes – post from last July showing our PVC tomato trellis design

General Links:

The Longleaf Breeze Planting Database

Join us at the (online) Longleaf Breeze Social

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