I'm so envious of y'all. I had one roma plant last year that produced more than we would normally buy, but we ate every last one of them. It even continued to produce for weeks after the spider mites moved in. So this year, I put in a big vegetable garden, grew a bunch of different heirlooms and hybrids from seeds (catalogues and saved), bought tomatoe cages and organic tomato fertilizer, set up drip hoses. The works. I haven't gotten a single tomato yet. I don't seem to have diseases. Some caterpillars, but I've been picking them off. Mostly, I've just got tall, rangy looking tomato plants that sometimes flower, but don't set fruit. Anyone got thoughts on what I did wrong? Tried too hard? I'm new to this. Susannah

OH, I get Annies Catalog but will have to go to her website and look for the tomato seedlings! I did order already from Wild Boar. I never been one to have any patience, I ordered the tomato seeds from Wild Boar Farms that I wanted. I read on their website that tomato seeds are good for ten years so I guess mine will be fine until I start them next spring! I ordered - Black And Brown Boar Red Boar Pink Boar Sweet Carneros Pink Pink Berkley Tie Dye I really have to start seeds next spring as I want to grow these. Plus there is another type of tomatoes that I want to grow and those are The New Dwarfs. I know plants of those will not be available locally so seeds it is. It seems to me that this dwarf tomato project is the most exciting thing to hit the tomato world in years! Here is a link that might be useful: The Dwarf Tomato Project

Sammy, I don't have a greenhouse, although it is on my "wish list". Maybe one of these days. I start my seeds in 72-cell flats on Super Bowl Sunday and grow the seedlings under lights for about 4 to 5 weeks before I start moving them outside for part of each day to harden off. My light shelf is just one of those assemble-it-yourself plastic shelving units you buy at a place like Lowe's or Home Depot. I use ordinary shop light fixtures with plain old fluorescent lights. I leave the lights on for 12 hours a day, more or less. The light fixtures are on a chain and the chain is attached to hooks that DH screwed into the bottom of each shelf. Using the chains, I can raise and lower the height of the lights as needed. This is very important as you want your light source as close to the plants as possible without actually touching the plants. Keeping the lights very close to the plants keeps the young plants from stretching and getting leggy. When it is time to harden off the seedlings, I give them 1 hour of outside time the first day, 2 hours the second day, etc. I am careful to put them in a location that is completely sheltered from the wind because too much wind can cause windburn and windburn will kill the plants in the same way sunburn will. After a week of gradually lengthening exposure to outdoor conditions, the plants are hardened off and ready to go into the ground. Now comes the tricky part.... Just because the plants are ready to go into the ground does not mean the weather is going to cooperate with me and the calendar. So, sometimes I carry them outside every day for a couple of weeks before the weather is cooperative enough for me to plant them in the ground. And, if worse comes to worse and a major cold spell settles in for several consecutive days and the plants have to spend all those days inside, then they lost their "hardened off" status and I have to start all over with the hardening off process. Down here in extreme south-central OK, with an average last freeze date of March 27th, I like to get my plants in the ground between March 5th and March 27th, and the earlier the better. Is it risky? Yes. Sometimes we have sleet or snow after I have planted and, in that case, I cover up the plants and hope for the best. The same is true of cold nights--early planting means you must be diligent about covering up the plants on any night that it might possibly go below 40 degrees. Frost, after all, can form at 38 or 39 degrees if all the other conditions are just right. Planting early is the key to having plants in bloom and setting fruit before the temperatures get hot enough to impede fertilization. Because I am a tomato maniac, I also plant 4 to 8 plants in containers in the late Feb. to earliest March timeframe, and carry them into the very well-insulated barn every night, and back outside every morning. Using this method and using tomato plants purchased in Dallas in 6" pots the minute they arrive at Lowe's or Home Depot, I generally have my first ripe tomato between April 20th and May 1st. This is possible only because the plants I buy are about 10"-15" tall and in bloom when I buy them. I cannot even explain how important these first early tomatoes are and how much we enjoy them. I could raise the early plants myself, but to get them to the size they are when I purchase them, I'd have to start the seed around Nov. 1st and the holidays are too busy as it is. I think that tomato seedlings transplant best when they are 6 to 8 weeks old. Anything older than that and they suffer more transplant shock. And, even though I advocate early planting, there is no point in doing it if the soil is still very cold because they won't grow in cold soil. Instead, they'll just sit and sulk until the ground warms up. In Feb. and Mar. I check the Mesonet soil temperature data daily and then, when it is in the right range in my county, I go out with my thermometer and check the soil in my beds to see if it is warm enough. With early planting in the ground, if I am able to keep the plants from freezing to death or suffering freeze damage, even my in-the-ground plants will give me ripe tomatoes before Memorial Day, which is at least a month earlier than my gardening neighbors can even hope to have a ripe tomato. One of my "old farmer" neighbors tried for 7 or 8 years to "beat me" by having the first ripe tomato and finally decided it couldn't be done. LOL (I'm not competitive--I just want to have ripe tomatoes to eat as early as possible!) Some years, after we've eaten the first 3 or 4 earliest tomatoes, I'll give the next couple to my "old farmer" friend because I know he and his wife are as hungry for a garden-fresh tomato as we are, and they probably won't have ripe ones until mid- to late-June. If I am very, very careful with my spring plantings and am able to carry the tomatoes deep into fall, we eat ripe tomatoes at our house from April through late November or early December, and sometimes into January if I have late keepers. In the winter months, we have "oven dried" tomatoes to toss into salads or to use in cooking, and some years I can and make sauce. I'd rather have the tomatoes fresh, but canned, dried or frozen ones are still better than the garbage that grocery stores call "tomatoes". Right now, in fact, I have a big pot of tortilla soup on the stove and I can't wait to eat it. When I harvest onions in June, I chop up a ton of them and freeze them in zip-lock bags and I do the same with peppers. So, when it is time to cook, all I have to do is open up a few zip-lock bags and pour the stuff into the pot. Right now, I still have a lot of onions, tomatoes, peppers and corn in the freezer. By about Feb. or early March, though, I am counting the ziplock bags left in the freezers, and hoping we have enough home-grown stuff to last until we can harvest again. Dawn

Hello again Villian189! I am glad that you are rethinking the size of your beds. There are many knowledgeable people on this forum and I am sure you will receive some great advice. I am happy to share what works for me. I have six 4x4 SFGs with paths wide enough to allow me to run a mower in between the gardens and kneel down at the edges of the garden and reach in to every square. I have a trellis at the north edge of most of these beds made out of 2x3s with nylon trellising for vertical plants. I have found that planting 3 vining tomatoes along the 4-foot wide trellis works best. As gblack mentioned, you will get more production from each plant if they are given the room to thrive. I do prune the tomatoes a little and weave them into the nylon trellis as they grow and also wrap them with twine to the trellis supports. The tomatoes do crowd the row of squares immediately in front of them by mid-growing season. So I plant spring greens in these squares (lettuces, arugula, spinach, etc.) before the tomatoes are planted out. If you keep the lower branches of the tomato plants trimmed, they will provide a nice shade canopy for the greens as the summer heats up. Ok, according to Mel BartholomewâÂÂs The All-new Square Foot Gardening book, suggested plant spacing for the varieties you wish to grow are as follows: Tomato plants, vine type = 1/square along a trellis Summer squash, bush type= 1 in a 9 squares (3x3 area) Winter squash, vining type = 1 in a 2 squares (1x2 area) Basil = 4/square Oregano = 1/square Cilantro = 1/square Parsley = 1/square Peppers = 1/square Eggplant = 1/square Pole beans = 8/square along a trellis Lettuce = 4/square So, if I understood your latest post correctly, you plan on building two 3x4 SFG. This will give you 24 squares to work with. In this following suggestion, I have assumed you will have a trellis along the north side of each garden along the 4-foot side. SFG 1: Back squares: 3 vining tomato plants can be planted along the north side along a trellis. Middle squares: 3 squares of greens and/or lettuces. 1 square herb. Front squares: Peppers and eggplant, they will shade out your lettuce, but it may help keep the lettuce from bolting when the weather gets warm. SFG2: Back squares: Pole beans - plant these towards the back of the bed right along the trellis and they will only take up inches of your garden space and grow vertically. Middle and Front two squares, plus extra room from the partial bean squares: 1 bush type squash (such as zucchini or yellow summer squash) Remaining squares: herbs or a pepper. This should get you started. Let me know what you think. Rachel GrafixMuse's Garden Spot Blog