Justin's 2014 Garden

[jmhammRN]

Hello all...........Here is my first large scale effort at growing tomatoes. And also my first time growing in containers. I hope for the best but will prepare for the worst. I hope this is a good learning experience.

I've already survived my first test - growing from seed!

Planted seeds March 23rd

1 - Sweet Ozark Orange
2 - Black Krim
3 - Mortgage Lifter
4 - Hillbilly
5 - Chocolate Cherry
6 - Yellow Pear
7 - Brandywine Pink
8 - Brandywine
9 - Red Siberian
10 - Pineapple
11 - Beef Maestro
****All planted on March 23rd****
****6 of each variety for a total of 66****


By March 28th 53/66 had germinated

Sweet Ozark Orange 5/6, Black Krim 4/6, Mortgage Lifter 6/6, Hillbilly 4/6, Chocolate Cherry 6/6, Yellow Pear 6/6, Brandywine Pink 3/6, Brandywine 2/6, Red Siberian 6/6, Pineapple 6/6 and Beef Maestro 5/6.

All seeds, except for Sweet Ozark, were bought at a local nursery and I think most were Burpee. I used the Hydrofarm Germination Station with heat mat and had it placed in a south facing window.

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I guess I should have moved the seedling to a grow light shortly after the first ones emerged but I hadn't purchased one yet. So after seeing them get leggy I went to Home Depot and put together a rigged up couple of grow lights. I bought two clamp light reflectors and two flood lights that were labeled "plant lights." Those things got sooo hot I had to keep them far away from the seedlings in order to keep from burning them up and even kept a box fan to help dissipate the heat!!!!
I also used the thermostat plug I bought for the heat mat to turn off one of the grow lights if the temp ever got above 87*.

So for now that's all I have time to post as I've setup a photobucket account and uploaded all my photos to it. I started typing this thread over 2 hours ago and with all the uploading I haven't gotten very far with my post..............which I had hoped to post all progress tonight. Obvisoulsy this isn't going to happen tonight as I am trying to figure out the easiest way to upload photos. I really just wanted to upload them directly but the pics were too big and Tomatoville wouldn't autosize them, and I didn't want to have to manually resize them all. So that's why I set up the Photobucket account. I found a nice little box on the Photobucket page while looking at my picture where I could click on the link and it would copy it. I thought this would post a link or thumbnail onto my post but it just gave me an error. So I then tried to just use the 'direct' option which just attatched the photos. So I have no ideal if they will be too big or what. So I will just leave it with this and a few pictures for now to see how it looks.

Maybe after a little more investigation I will figure it out and finish my posting my garden progress to date.

Hope you all enjoy, I know I enjoy viewing everybody's pictures - although I highly doubt mine will be bumper crop quality!!!!!!

[jmhammRN]

On 3/26 I planted out some plants I had bought at Lowe's, Sungold x3 (I hope they are really Sungold) and a local nursery, Burpee Grafter Bumper Crop Mortgage Lifter x2 and Big Rainbow Heirloom and two plants grown by them - Champion and Cherokee Purple.

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Now obviously our winter weather was far from over here in Oklahoma so I built a 'hoop house' over my raised bed. It was a very rigged up greenhouse indeed. Now, either my raised bed needed to be wider or I should have used smaller PVC pipe because I had no sooner gotten the first pipe bend over when I heard a very strange sound. I looked back and my PVC pipe had given way and creased in the middle. I gave the next one a try thinking I just needed to ease into the bend at a slower pace. No sir, that didn't work either -- same result

So at that point it looked as if I was going to have a tent instead of a greenhouse!!!!!! However, I wasn't about to take the time to return what I had bought, re-buy supplies and waste the damaged PVC. Because I was behind schedule and had already hoped to have plants out a couple weeks sooner. With that I just brought out the southern engineering!!!. I simply cut out the creased portion of the pipes and screwed the ends into a 2x4, one for the front pipes and one for the back. I then built the sides - which I had planned on doing anyway to have doors - and put a brace in the center of the two 2x4s. Built the doors, or at least one as I just used bags of mix to block one end, and slapped plastic over it all. And voila, a place to keep my tomato plants safe!!!

These picture were taken a week after building the hoop house and planting

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You can see from the pictures that my first attempt at heating the hoop house was heat flood lights. This obviously didn't work very well so I quickly just added space heaters - which worked very well and even too well on one occasion. I woke up from a not so cold night and checked the thermostat in the hoop house and the temp was around 90*!!!!!!



Now on to the seedlings


Here are the seedlings a few days after introducing them to the grow lights, which were introduced on 3/29


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And here they are 1 week after grow lights - 3/30



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If you notice a few more 'empty' cell thats the result of the wonderful grow lights I mentioned in the first post. I scorched 6 little seedlings.
Went to bed with all well and by the next morning those 6 little seedlings were crunchy critters!!!!!

I lost the following: Mortgage Lifter x1, Hillbilly x1, Red Siberian x3 and Beef Maestro x1

After this event is when I started using the temp probe outlet and box fan in hopes of preventing a total meltdown

3/30 - I kept the yet to germinate cells watered in hopes that I would get some extra sprouting. And on this day I noticed two seeds that were waking up - Black Krim (5/6 germination) and Brandywine (3/6 germination)

3/31-4/1 -- Over half the seedlings had their first true leaves

4/5 -- Yet another seed germinated - Brandywine (4/6 germination)

About 4 or 5 days later, didn't write down the date, another seed sprouted - Brandywine Pink (4/6 germination)

More to follow............

[jmhammRN]

Seedlings were transplanted the weekend of 4/12 to clear 16oz plastic cups. While the seedlings did get leggy after leaving them too long without artificial light it actually turned out really well. I was actually able to bury those sucker deep when transplanting from the little cells into the 16oz cups. With the subpar grow lights I had made and the extra space needed when transplanting up I finally decided to get a real grow light I ordered this grow light http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Let me tell you, that sucker is nice and bright!!. Thank goodness for Amazon and being a Prime member. I really needed it quick and ordered Friday with deeply discounted one day shipping, Prime member benefit, and I was glad to see it delivered on Saturday. Amazon has recently added Oklahoma City to the list of Saturday delivery options, thank goodness! Here is a picture from 4/16
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4/22 - Updated picture of the seedlings, they sure do like their new grow light

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Here are updated pictures of the hoop house plants taken on 4/16. They stayed nice and toasty in there. As I mentioned, it didn't take long to figure out my initial heat source wasn't very good. Two space heaters worked great - one if the temps weren't that cold and both if the temp dropped below 40. We did have a handful of nights below freezing after my plant out date of 3/26.

1st picture
Left row from near to far - Mortgage Lifter, Mortgage Lifter, Big Rainbow
Middle row from near to far - Cherokee Purple, Champion, Sungold
Right row - all Sungold
mixed in is basil and oregano

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[JamesL]

Nice job Justin! Lookin good.

[jmhammRN]

Thanks James

However, I am going to have to incriminate myself, at least before someone else does!!! I just finished read a thread on Brandywine that was revived from a year ago and realized I have made an error. I confessed my ignorance on that thread and will do it here as well

I thought that I was growing 11 varieties of tomatoes from seed but come to find out it's really only 10. I had no ideal that Brandywine and Brandywine pink are the same thing.

So glad to have found this site. It's already making me smarter

[2nd Foundation]

This is great, Justin, I love it all! Great pics! I'll be following along~
Caroline

[JamesL]

Originally Posted by jmhammRN

Thanks James

However, I am going to have to incriminate myself, at least before someone else does!!! I just finished read a thread on Brandywine that was revived from a year ago and realized I have made an error. I confessed my ignorance on that thread and will do it here as well

I thought that I was growing 11 varieties of tomatoes from seed but come to find out it's really only 10. I had no ideal that Brandywine and Brandywine pink are the same thing.

If that is your worst mistake you are way ahead of the game....

[jmhammRN]

Thanks guys. I hope to post some more in the coming days. Worked a lot this weekend, not gardening, so I am still trying to get my pictures in order. Hope to get everything to date posted this week and then be able to post in real time, or at least within a few days of the events happening

Good luck to all with this season

[newatthiskat]

Good thing Brandywine is such a good tomato it is worth double the plants!

[Stvrob]

Originally Posted by jmhammRN

......
I thought that I was growing 11 varieties of tomatoes from seed but come to find out it's really only 10. I had no ideal that Brandywine and Brandywine pink are the same thing.

At least you found out before you decided to write about how much you prefer the taste of one over the other!

[jmhammRN]

Originally Posted by Stvrob

At least you found out before you decided to write about how much you prefer the taste of one over the other!

SO true! It would probably be like a placebo effect. My brain would have picked out some 'subtle' difference between the two!

[jmsieglaff]

Loving the pictures! Keep 'em coming! You also have a love for Sungold in addition to the heirlooms!

[jmhammRN]

So here are updated pictures from 4/30.

Seedlings are about on day 6 of hardening off.

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As you can see the Oklahoma wind has been blowing them around quite a bit. With that and then letting them dry out to the point of slight wilting they seem to be pretty solid at this point. Some leaflets look pretty scruffy but that will just get them ready for the constant wind and pleasant.... summer that we have here.






Update on the raised bed

I had planned on taking the plastic off either at this point or over that coming weekend but we had a possibility of frost predicted for the first week in May here.

Burpee grafter Mortgage Lifter

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Sungold


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Three in each row, from left to right and front to back

Burpee grafted Mortgage Lifter x2, Burpee grafted Big Rainbow
Cherokee Purple, Champion, Sungold
Last row - all three Sungold


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First tomato, with the exception of the little Sungolds,
a Mortgage Lifter

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So at this point I figured I would have some more blossoms and fruit set, especially from the Sungolds. They had a good amount of blooms but they didn't set as much fruit as I would have expected. I can probably attribute it to two things. First, without a thermostat in the hoop house I'm sure some nights it got warmer than it should have in there and even though I opened up the doors during the day - the temps might have gotten pretty warm on some days. Second, I still haven't fertilized at this point, with the exception of the Osmocote. I guess I should have said supplemental fertilization, something to kick things into high gear. I did use some soil amendment/compost called Humor when preparing the soil in addition to some Texas green sand.

Somehow I just got in autopilot mode and only kept them watered. I was more focused on the seedlings.

[jmhammRN]

Here is the site where my 8 Earthtainers and 2 Earthboxes will live. I am about to start construction of a basic 'bed' along the fence using landscape timbers and filling it with mulch. As you can see Bailey has taken up residence for the moment at this proposed site. I have never seen her lay by that fence..............maybe she is trying to protest the build, probably worried she won't be able to get as close as she wants when barking at the dog next door


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Here are my soil building products:

I finally found Promix at an organics/hydroponics store in town, but it was at a premium price. But I wish I would have found it before first ordering a bag on Amazon.............now that was an extremely premium price, however, I just wanted at least one bag to see what the hype was about. So I had two bags of Promix.


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I recently read posts for Sunshine Mix #4 and Advanced #4. Again, found this at the organics/hydroponics store. Funny story here, there was no price listed for the bag and when I checked out........ <---that is probably what I looked like It was like $55!! So, unless I get 50lbs or more of tomatoes off a plant I won't be using this mix again.


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Decided to experiment a little and make my own peat and coir mixes


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Closest thing I could find to bark fines, we'll see how it works. It may actually be bark fines I just have never seen them before. The picture on the bag makes it appear like it is ground cover mulch.



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A little something extra, only used a little in the SWCs and a few extra scoops in the Smartpots.


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Come Monday, still no plants out It took longer than expected to build the bed and then, especially this, to mix up the soil for the containers. But everything is setup. I still have more soil to mix up at this point to fill the containers. The one Earthbox does have tomatoes in it. However, these were planted a couple weeks ago and I would just move them under the patio if the temps were going to get too cold.


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[Salsacharley]

Hey Justin,

Your stuff looks very good. I think your framed-in door on the hoop house is genius. You should get some great, but a bit pricey tomatoes. In your last picture of your lined up earth boxes, which direction is east? It looks like your boxes are pretty close to the fence and that might make too much shade later in the season. I do see the picture where your entire spot is totally sun, and that's great.

Thanks for sharing,

Charley