Anne's 2014 Garden start-up

[aclum]

Hi,

Well, this being the Ides of March, I thought today would be the most auspicious day to start planting out my tomatoes !

Here's the line up for my centrally located "big bed" - 5' x 16.' I plan to prune to two leaders on each plant (we'll see how well that goes ). Most of the plants in this batch are grafted onto RST-04-105-T rootstock - they will be designated with an asterisk (*). No particular plan to all this, except I tried to mix up colors, types, sbapes, etc. so I wouldn't have two similar looking types right next to each other.

Row One - running from West to East

Bed Barn (ungrafted control)
Red Barn *
Lucky Cross *
Barlow Japanese *
Wes *
Marvel Stripe *
Wolford Wonder *
Purple Dog Creek *
Margaret Curtain *
Dester *

Row Two - running from West to East

Malachite Box (ungrafted control)
Malachite Box *
Malachite Box - grafted onto Tasmanian Chocolate as Rootstock - to note any dwarfing effect
Dana's Dusky Rose (ungrafted)
KBX *
Cowlick's Brandywine *
Berkeley Tie-Dye Heart *
Cuostralee *
Crnkovic Yugoslavian *

If I can get the next bed cleaned up and labels made, I hope to be planting about another 20 tomorrow. I'll try and post some photos once things are a bit more "developed."

Anne

P.S. After writing this, I came across an ungrafted Malachite Box seedling in my greenhouse. So I took out the Liz Birt - which will go elsewhere - and replaced it with the ungrafted MB. BTW, I prefer the name Malachite Box to the Russian version of the name as we actually have a malachite cigarette box that's been in the family over 50 years. Not that anyone should care !

[JamesL]

Anne,
Best of luck on the season!
Any experimentation yet with Dr. Delerium's Double or Triple Play Grafts? (tm patent pending) lol
I have been dropping a batch of seed a week, batch 3 goes down tomorrow, for grafting play. Looking forward to getting in on the fun. I still have 2 months till plant out...

[aclum]

Hi James,

Thanks! It always seems to be touch and go planting out early - but so far all my plants survived overnight at least !

It's hard for me to imagine all the weird weather going on back east - two months seems like a LONG time! At least you'll have plenty of time to do some grafting and have some decent sized plants to set out when the time comes.

No "fancy grafts" for the moment. I tried some for fun (and killing time) a while back, but most of those early grafts kicked the bucket for some reason when I transplanted them into Pro-Mix HP along with dilute fertilizer and put them out in my greenhouse. I think I over-fertilized them. At any rate, I did master the stacked graft and the multiple graft which I'll play around with once I get the basic garden planted. I also want to attempt what I'll call Delerium's new 'bouquet graft" where, apparently, you do a vertical graft along the side edges of several plants at once . Something to try and figure out .

I should have plenty of suckers on my regular plants to experiment with (including a couple of ungrafted 105 rootstock plants to harvest suckers from). I'm really straying off topic here, but what I want to try next is to play around with the 'rapid rooter' rooting cubes for cloning and come up with a method for shipping rooted cuttings safely at low cost ---- but that's probably for another thread when the time comes.

Anyway, I just came in from planting out another 20 seedlings and will post the list next. Then it's on to fixing dinner which will include our first homegrown asparagus of the season !

Anne

[aclum]

Hi,

I planted out my second bed today. It's 3' x 16' and just south of the first (5x16) bed mentioned above.

This batch has fewer grafted plants, but most of the ones that are grafted are planted alongside ungrafted controls. Also, since it's a narrower bed, I have all of my dwarfs and a couple of smaller plants along the south side of the bed. Since they'll be small plants, I don't plan on pruning them like the others, so they will have more foliage cover for the fruit and can probably take more sun exposure than the heavily pruned plants. The row to their immediate north is mainly midsize plants, with more blacks, as I understand they like more sun and heat and they should get pretty good exposure "over the heads" of the dwarfs to their south.

Bed 2 (* indicates grafted to RST-04-105-T rootstock, u indicates ungrafted, and uc indicates ungrafted control)

Row 1 - north side, running West to East

(NOT) Liz Birt * - RL (should be PL but came out of the Liz Birt seed packet)
Cherokee Purple - u
Goose Creek - uc
Goose Creek *
BKX - u
Magi-Qo - uc
Magi-Qo *
Amazon Chocolate - PL -u
Gianinni - u
Spudtula - u

Row 2 - south side, running West to East

Dwarf Artic Rose - u
Tasmanian Chocolate - u
Dwarf Sweet Sue - u
Zachary - uc
Zachary *
Dwarf Beryl Beauty - uc
Dwarf Beryl Beauty *
Perth Pride -u
Summertime Gold -uc
Summertime Gold *

(I have the impression that Zachary is a small plant, but I could be wrong - will have to look it up, I suppose).

I'm curious as to how the rootstock might affect the size and production of the dwarfs - hoping that it might up production, etc. without changing the mature height of the plant.

Anne

[JamesL]

Anne,
You had quite the busy weekend!
Delerium's new 'bouquet graft" - that's the one I am talking about. I was hoping you would get to it before me.
Maxifort again for me and I am trying Estamino rootstock this year which is supposed to be more generative.

[rnewste]

Great job Anne!

You are really pushing the envelope with all your good work. Can't wait to see some pictures.

Raybo

[aclum]

Raybo,

Thanks! I hope to get some photos pretty soon. The seedlings are really small and scrawny looking at this point so I'm waiting for them to become (hopefully) more photogenic! Hope all's going well with your new grafting endeavors - and look forward to more photos from you when the time is right.

James,

The estamino rootstock looks very good to me and I might try it out next time around. I've become intrigued with the BB X EPB that Dar and others have mentioned - most recently in the "cold tolerant" thread. I was thinking this might make a good rootstock.... Will have to try and get my hands on one....


It's been really windy today and the little plants in the garden are getting a good workout, but seem to be doing OK. However, I did discover two fatalities from Bed 2 this morning. The BKX seemed chopped off at the bottom (have bamboo skewers next to the stem so not cutworms) and a really tiny grafted dwarf Beryl Beauty had broken off at the graft. I replaced the BKX with an ungrafted control Margaret Curtain (to compare to the grafted version I already have planted). I replaced the dwarf Beryl Beauty with a grafted dwarf Sweet Sue (to compare with my ungrafted d. Sweet Sue already planted). I've got backup BKX's but they're still too small to transplant.

FWIW!
Anne