We planted more tomato plants this year than last, and they are still bringing us joy and tomatoes into mid-October. We staggered the planting too, adding more plants as more space became available to us through our neighbor’s generosity. The result of that spread out planting time is that some of our plants are close to spent while others are still producing. If the end of the growing season weren’t approaching so quickly, we’d have lots more tomatoes. We planted more than 20 plants, all told.
We just weren’t very picky about the tomatoes.
We ended up with several “just okay” varieties of plants. Anyone who knows the song
Home Grown Tomatoes
(chorus)
Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes.
There’s just two things that money can’t buy
And that’s true love
And homegrown tomatoes.
and who knows how often it gets sung at our house in the summer months knows that homegrown tomatoes beat anything you can buy in the grocery store hands-down. All homegrown tomatoes are not equal however.
How did we plant so many “just okay” tomatoes? We had a couple tomato plants given to us that we planted.
We also picked up a “few more sets” a couple of times at the Farmers’ Market. Because the pickings were getting slim, we came home with some tomato sets that we don’t normally buy.
Next year, we’ll skip over the Big Boy and the Early Girl varieties. They are just too common. We’ll skip hybrids altogether, I think, and concentrate on the Heirloom varieties we’ve grown to love.
