My god, I’ve successfully grown something!
Windowbox #1:
Windowbox #2:
Tomatoes from windowbox #1:
Tomatoes from windowbox #2:
So far, the winners are the Early Girl in #2, and the one whose tag I lost in #1. Or never had a tag. And the other two plants — the Jersey Devil and the Green Zebra — have flowers, which looks like the precursor to actual fruit-bearing.
The basil’s doing nicely, but the cilantro’s being a little fussy. It gets a lot of yellow leaves, but it seems to be a water issue, so I just have to keep on top of that. None of the flowers except for the one in the ceramic pot in #2 are doing that well; all have yellow leaves and dead flowers. I can’t tell if they’re getting too much or too little water, or what, but they’re annoying me enough that if they don’t shape up soon, I’m just going to pull them out and let the tomatoes take over their space.
I has jealous. There’s really nothing better than fresh tomatoes from the garden-I am eagerly awaiting the day when I have some living arrangement that supports the growing of tomatoes. Not, you know, a northwest facing backyard that’s totally shaded and that regularly gets beer cans and pizza boxes tossed into it. (Why yes, I do live on a college campus).
I joke that there are three reasons I would move back to New Jersey: tomatoes, corn, and blueberries. (I think when I started off with the “there are three reasons I would move back to New Jersey…” with my Mom, she thought I was going to say “Mom, Dad, and the dog.” I might have crushed her a little. Ooops.)
Mmmmm…. fresh tomatoes…. mmmmm
beautiful tomatoes–wish i had room to grow them on my ledge (not just for the fruit, but for the lovely, heady scent when the leaves are rubbed).
“all have yellow leaves and dead flowers.”
are you dead-heading your flowers? (i’ve found even those plants which claim “no dead-heading required” do better being dead-headed).
and tomatoes and petunias are both heavy feeders–maybe you need something more in your watering can?
I’m not sure I know what dead-heading is. Is that just cutting off dead flowers and leaves so resources don’t get wasted on them?
And what’s a good thing to put in the watering can? I don’t want to just pour chemicals on the plants.
Yes, you just pull off the dead blossoms. It helps quite a bit.
I’m not an expert gardener, but if the tomatoes need more nitrogen, you can use coffee grounds. I’m sure there are other non-chemical ways to help them along.
You can try fish emulsion or fish & kelp meal — that should do the trick for tomatoes, and you can mix it into the water. If you want vegan natural fertilizers, try some sort of seed meal (cottonseed, canola seed, etc.) and / or kelp meal. You can just sprinkle some along the top of the container — it’ll break down over time into the soil.
I’ve got eight plants in my backyard, and I’m very jealous of your east coast success. Here in Oregon, it just barely gets hot enough to grow good tomatoes, and most of the tastier once come very late in the season.
If you decide to grow tomatoes again next year, you might be happier long term if you go with determinate varieties. Early Girl is a great variety for getting tasty, early tomatoes, but it’s also indeterminate, which means it’ll keep growing until something kills it, usually frost. After a while, it could become difficult to manage and outgrow the container.
Determinate varieties stop growing at about 4 feet tall. These won’t tax your soil so much and do much better in pots.
Your tomatoes look great! I’m so jealous! I just got blooms a couple of weeks ago.
“Is that just cutting off dead flowers and leaves so resources don’t get wasted on them?”
Kinda–removing withered flowers stops the plant from going to seed (when it goes to seed, it gets the message to stop blooming). People have different techniques, but the one that works for me is pinching (not cutting) off the flower just below where it joins the stem, right under those five tiny leaves (that sounds confusing, but if you look at the plant it’ll make sense).
For organic tomato feed, I can’t recommend anything directly, but if you ever go the green market at Union Square, some of the vendors are great resources for tips, products, etc.
One of those tips they gave me(which I hesitate to pass on–because people are always passing on cautionary tales about gardens–but fuck it, I’d like to know if it were me) is that petunias can be a lure to moths (and those moths lay eggs–at night–which give rise to hungry little caterpillars on your petunia plants).
I ended up replacing my petunias last summer because I had an infiltration of moths (which I initially–and cluelessly–thought were butterflies; look, night butterflies, how lovely!) Replacing three pots of flowers was a pain in the ass, but easily remedied–because my pots weren’t mixed–but you’ve got tomato plants to consider, so thought you might want the info to keep an eye out (i.e., if your petunia blooms start having little holes in the blossoms, they’re being eaten).