The next opportunity I had to start tomatoes was in February of 2010 when I put Sun Gold Cherry Tomato seeds in the AeroGarden Deluxe. Here they are a short time later, on March 2, 2010:
The round leafed plant among them is Tendergreen Amaranth.
When they were about a month old I moved them out into the back yard into clay pot where the first buds appeared on March 30.
Here is a fuzzy baby photographed on May 21:
And now, ready for munching on May 28, 2010:
Blogged about these here: Start of 2010 Tomato Crop
ARCHIVES:
Here are a few in-progress shots of our Fall 2008 "crop" of tomatoes:
Flowers ready to hand-pollinate
A pollinated flower
Its work is done, so this flower is ready to fall off, leaving what will soon be a tiny tomato.
Dwarfed by my littlest finger.
Now the biggest baby is starting to show a bit of yellow color. This is a Golden Cherry Tomato from the AeroGrow Kit. There are more on the way:
Here is our first Red Cherry Tomato from the AeroGrow Kit:
Almost ripe:
This is a "clone" from one of the plants in that kit. When I pruned the branches back to photograph the little tomatoes shown above, I stuck the cuttings in a glass of water and they rooted in about four days. Normally I would have stuck the rooted cuttings back in another AeroGarden, but there were none available at the time, so I put them in a container of Hydroton grow rocks instead. Today I noticed several tiny buds had formed, too small to be seen in this photo:
Since 3 bushy tomato plants are about as much as one AeroGarden can handle, when I planted first planted the 3 seed packets provided in the AeroGrow kit, the four remaining grow holes beckoned so I put a variety of indeterminate vining tomato seeds in alongside them. They quickly outgrew their spaces vertically, so even before the determinates could crowd them horizontally, I took them out of the AG and started experimenting with different ways of growing them on the side.
It was still too hot outside to put them out, and they were getting far too tall to benefit from sitting beside the AGs. Furthermore, they kept getting tiny buds, always near the top, but nevertheless I had to keep cutting them back. Naturally, I rooted the cuttings, and although this stressed the plant enough to make the tiny buds fall off, it did generate new plants. This went on for over a month before things cooled down enough to put them out, but now we will see if the new buds can flower and set fruit before the weather changes again:
To be honest, I really did not expect these to bear fruit, but here we see the first tiny tomato, along with a bud, an open flower, and a flower about to fall and reveal another almost microscopic fruit:
How big will these get? I don't know, as I am as green at this as the tomato itself. It is a hybrid from the Taki Seed Company in Japan, and was described by the vendor as a medium sized tomato. Oh, oh, I'd better starting thinking about stakes!
This one, however, is going to have itsy bitsy teeny weeny tomatoes, however, and lots of them, I hope. It is a red currant tomato:
Put out about the same time as the Tropic Boy pictured above, this one is just starting to get clusters of buds:
These vining tomatoes wanted to grow 12 feet long on one single vine, so I started wrapping the stem around and around in circles:
