How do tomatoes grow?

The last couple of months I've been busy carefully watering my tomato plants and watching them grow.  I've found the whole experience of growing vegetables from seed to be very inspiring and thought I'd share the inspiration with you.

Here's a video that I created with photos that I have taken of our plants all the way, from seedlings to bright green tomatoes. 

Lessons learned from a first time vegetable gardener:
- Next time, I think I'll try creating a tomato cage and not relying on a single stake, which doesn't seem to have done anything to keep this tomato plant from looking like a Xmas tree.
- Also, remember to remove sideshoots which are the leafy branches with no flowers that take energy away from the fruit production.

- The truss, is the group of yellow flowers eventually whither off, leaving small green tomatoes behind.  I read this and other great tomato facts on Tomato Lover.

- After a lot of online research, I discovered that inconsistent watering and calcium delivery causes blossom end rot.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree how much water the plant needs, some say there's no such thing as too much, others disagree, some recommend putting your finger a couple inches into the soil and if that's dry, add water.  In the end, I stopped researching and just did what felt right and hoped for the best.  (what felt right was watering every morning until the soil looked soaked).

Sharing the vegetable growing experience with my kids has been fun and educational but the sharing didn't stop there.  We shared the experience with many of our friends in the neighbourhood as after starting the tomatoes from seed, I had too many seedlings, and gave away small potted plants to anyone who came to visit us.  The kids even helped me decorate a window container, which we potted up with soil and a small plant for a friend's engagement.

You can read about how I got started growing tomatoes from seed in a previous post. 

Happy gardening!

How to grow tomatoes from seed

Growing tomatoes is supposed to be very easy, and in my short experience, if you don't forget the watering, it really is.  I found a simple youtube video which gives clear guidelines on how to grow tomatoes from seed.

I used this Morgan & Thompson youtube video as a guide and made a few modifications.

Firstly, I did not invest in packet tomato seeds, and simply used the seeds from overripe baby tomatoes left in my fridge and destined for the trash.

I read somewhere that egg cartons make a good starting 'pot' as the water drains through them.

So I took half an egg carton, put it out on my kitchen windowsill and filled it with a nice compost mix (now I have no experience and no idea what makes a GOOD compost mix, so I simply used the only mix that my local garden store sells).

I then squeezed out the seeds (pips) from a few baby tomatoes - I actually used many baby tomatoes, on successive days as I didn't really have faith that they would grow.

But they did grow.

The first time that I tried to grow tomatoes by seed, I didn't water them, and surprisingly, they didn't grow, so this time I was very religious about watering them well every day. 

And they grew, and grew and grew and grew.

It was really fun for the kids (and even more so for me) to watch the tiny germinated seedlings and note the appearance of the cotelydon leaves, and then the true leaves.  It was almost like my seedlings were acting straight from Renee's Garden's script. 

After the appearance of the first true leaves, I followed the instructions and transplanted to small pots.  My windowsill was full of little pots and I begged friends and family to 'adopt some of my seedlings', new seedlings continued to germinate in the egg carton but for lack of space and 'adoptive families', I had to put them out where they quickly dried out. 

I've read a lot about hardening off plants that were started from seeds indoors - I'm not sure if a windowsill is considered indoors - but for lack of patience I never hardened off any plants, and simply moved a few of them to a semi-shaded spot on the edge of the garden when I ran out of prime windowsill space.  Actually I would say those plants have done the best, so far.  Two of those outside plants were designated for my daughters, they each helped to transplant them and water them and it's very exciting as we watch the the plants literally grow from day to day.

Today I decided it was time to transplant my kids' tomato plants into their final destination.  Here's a video of how I did that.

Happy tomato growing everyone, if you have tomato plants too, let me know how they're going, and feel free to leave me tips.

Weeds or Greens?

In my journey to get as green as I can (while sacrificing as little as possible), it came to me,
what could be greener than... green... lettuce.

So I put on my farmer's hat and sowed some lettuce seeds.  I generously allowed my children to help, thereby turning it into an educational activity and  awarding myself a 'good job mom' award.
For a couple of weeks we watered the soil, and eagerly observed for growing seedlings.  Soon something grew, something that looked a lot - like a weed.  Every day I googled lettuce seedlings, and strained my eyes trying to compare my little 'green things' to the pictures on the internet, trying to decide which were weeds and which were lettuce seedlings and prayed that I was pulling out the weeds and not the plants.
Eventually I came to the upsetting conclusion, that the lettuce hadn't grown and that all the growing greens
- were weeds.

My "vegetable patch to be' is situated in an unused area of our frontyard so that if you don't make a conscious effort to visit it, it can easily be forgotten.  Which is exactly what happened.  The abandoned patch was blessed with lots of winter rain, and grew tall with all sorts of exciting varieties - of weeds!
As the end of winter approached, the weeds started peering into the window of my children's bedroom and I decided that it was time to break out the gardening equipment and start weeding... I would say I was knee-high in weeds, but that would be an understatement - it was more like shoulder high, yet I had a nice surprise waiting for me at the finish line.

After de-weeding the vegetable patch, I actually found - vegetables.  Three small lettuce plants had actually survived my abandoning them through the charity of winter rains.  I was very inspired and continued watering them - and even treated myself to a piece of lettuce (after thoroughly washing it).

The reason, that until today I have only eaten one piece of lettuce is that I am Jewish, living in Israel, and after enjoying my first care-free lettuce leaf, I was reminded that I first needed to abide by certain laws of Teruma and Maaser.  I have found several sources of how to do that, including an answer that I received form an Aish HaTorah Rabbi to my question, and have no more excuses so will hopefully be serving my home-grown lettuce to my family or guests soon...