What a great idea!!! I am the one who started that other thread (about alfalfa meal/pellets), and although I have found a place to buy a smaller size bag of it, I love the idea of the hand truck - since all my plants are in pots, and I do a certain amount of moving them around (searching for the perfect place that each plant will love), this sounds like the answer to my prayers. I remember that last year my sister (with whom I live now) and I discussed getting a child's wagon as a means of getting the bags of potting soil (also heavy, but only 25 Lbs.) from the car in the front yard to the garden in the back yard. But we never did it, because that still didn't get around the problem of lifting the bag into the wagon. Of course, we'd still have to lift it out of the car, but anntn chimed in here with the idea of having the store people place the bag on a tarp in the car - that would help on that score. So, sunnysideuphill, I'm clipping your post to my clippings file, because I also love all the different things you use it for. Thanks!!!

If the strawberries have already perished as a result of the sunflowers seeds, go ahead and dig the seeds into the soil. And I'd add some other organic matter as well. The decomposition of the seeds, together with the other OM, will neutralize the allelopathic effects fairly rapidly, although I'd avoid planting anything this season. If you want faster results, remove the seeds and compost them in a designated area, like with your other compostables. But still work in some other OM in the strawberry plot before replanting.

I think Mendopete is right about losses of mass due to evaporation. Remember that any bin system must be open to air flow, and as long as the stuff exposed to air is wetter than the air, moisture is gonna move to the air. Earthworms don't have urinary tracts. My own observation is that compost is less than half the volume of the stuff composted. But I'm not weighing in and out so I don't have a feel for weights. Since the answer to the ratio of weight in to weight out depends partly on the kind of stuff you're composting, I really don't see any way around trying this out and seeing how it goes. Re stackable trays, which I have, see various threads (via search) on the difficulty of teaching this system to the worms. On the whole, more worms will be toward the top where the feeding happens than the bottom, but some will always be hanging out down at the bottom. It's not as neat as the people who sell stackable trays would have you believe.

Is this true? I am rolling on the floor laughing after reading the list you posted, so that's my answer. Seriously, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry why I read that list. Even my non-gardening husband thought some of the recommendations were ridiculous, particularly the ones regarding fertilizer. Seriously, who in the world would use synthetic fertilizer at such a high rate in their garden???? My own answer to that question is that it would be someone who does not care about the long-term health of their soil in general and, in particular, they do not care about the lives of the billions of living microorganisms in their soil, which research shows are negatively affected by the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers. I try to garden as naturally as possible within reason (I do grow my seedlings in Miracle Grow soil-less mix and do so unapologetically because it produces great, healthy seedlings in the time frame I've allocated to produce them), and never would use synthetic fertilizers at the rate they recommend---either at planting time or on a weekly basis. This is exactly the sort of short-sighted practice that some commercial farmers use to obtain maximum yield while depleting the soil and leaving it worse off each year than it was the year before. I garden in a totally opposite way than what you see in this list because I am more concerned with the long-term health and improvement of the soil in our veggie garden than I am with the yield per plant. Many things on the list are, as Amy pointed out, fairly standard advice for folks who do not grow their tomatoes in an organic, sustainable method. It just so happens, though, that there are some things that are more important than a high yield---namely soil health and, to me, growing in the most sustainable way possible that will give us a decent yield without depleting/ruining the soil. Let's take the list item by item: 1) Proven hybrids that are known to produce well in our specific region and climate will give a higher yield. That is pretty much indisputable because the hybrids were bred/selected to produce high yields. I have nothing personal against hybrids and grow a few of them myself, but what I find over and over again at harvest time is that I mostly give away the hybrid fruit or use it in salsa, and what we eat fresh 95% of the time is open-pollinated, heirloom type fruit. If there is a bowl of mixed hybrids/heirlooms setting on the kitchen counter, everyone in my family will reach in there and choose the heirlooms until they're all used up, while the hybrids just sit there. It isn't a conscious thing we do by design, but it is just that after so many years of eating so many tomatoes, we know what we like, and what we prefer is the flavor and texture of O-P heirloom types. Most O-P heirloom types do not produce the heavier yields of modern-day hybrids, but we favor quality over quantity. Thus, knowing that, I know I need to plant a larger quantity of heirloom plants to get the same yield I could get from a smaller quantity of certain high-producing hybrids, and that's okay with me. 2 & 3. Trench planting is preferred by many people for a couple of reasons. Since tomato plants form new roots along any part of the stem buried in the soil, you'll get more roots and a stronger plant. Research supports that. Now, here is where it gets interesting for me. Many people favor the trench planting because it puts the plant stem and the roots that form from it near the soil surface...just an inch or two or three beneath it, right? That's great when you have cool to cold soil. What happens, though, if most of your growing season involves very hot weather and dry soil? That's what I have here. I want deeply-rooted plants where the roots can reach down low into the soil to search for water (and nutrients) and also stay more cool. So, I often plant deeply, but I don't trench plant. Instead I dig down a foot or so and slide the plant down into that hole, breaking off any branches/leaves that will be below ground. I get the same effect as with trench planting, but my roots are down deeper where the soil will stay cooler and more moist as the summer weather heats up. I have done both deep planting and trench planting in the same year, and it seemed like the deeply rooted plants withstood drought better and suffered less heat/drought stress than the plants that were trench planted more shallowly. A person may get different results with different soil types and different growing conditions, so I'm just relating what works best for me. Last year, with ongoing heavy rain, I did not plant deeply and that may have saved my plants from drowing, but last year's excessive rainfall was highly abnormal. When you trench plant and leave 3" of the plant sticking up above ground, realize that the 3" of exposed plant is very close to the soil surface and is more likely to pick up soil diseases caused by soil splash. So, if you plant this way, immediately mulch the entire area around that small portion of the plant above ground in order to reduce the incidence of disease transmittal by soil splash. 4. Because I care about the long-term health of the microbiota in my soil, I'd never use synthetic fertilizers at this rate. Never. It may produce large, productive plants, but the price you pay is the harm done to your soil, and that violates my belief in gardening in the way that is most sustainable. I don't know what the label on any synthetic, slow-release fertilizer recommends, and I'm sure it varies from one brand to the next, but I can't imagine that the label recommends using this much fertilizer per plant at planting time. If labels do recommend that, I still wouldn't do it, but then that is just me restating the obvious---that this sort of heavy fertilization with synthetic fertilizer is harmful to the soil in the long-term. 5. I use cages and do not have any problem with this recommendation, except for this: 5' tall is too short. My cages are 7-8' tall and the plants still often outgrow them and begin to cascade back down to the ground, which I allow them to do. It sort of creates a jungle effect, but I like tomato jungles as they are full of fruit. 6. This is a recommendation that will not harm your plants, but I generally do not do it myself. Wrapping cages in row cover is recommended by Bill Adams in his book as well as being recommended by many other people and there's nothing wrong with doing it. However, it is wind exposure that helps build strong plants, so I prefer to let my plants have that wind exposure while they are still seedlings. By the time the plants go into the ground, they have very sturdy main stems, which is exactly what I want. I garden in a partially sheltered area that has fairly good protection from north winds due to the adjacen forest. If I was up on a hill out in the open, I might wrap cages in row cover or even plastic, but since I garden in a creek hollow, I don't. I have, in past years, long before I started using row cover, wrapped the cages in plastic for the first month or so the plants were in the ground and it did provide great wind protection. However, I felt like it kept the foliage too protected and then the foliage suffered a bit more when I removed the plastic and it had to deal with real wind conditions. Row covers, depending on the thickness, might allow enough wind through to toughen up the plants a little while still giving them some protection, but I just don't find it necessary to do that. I'd kinda hate to cut up my row cover into smaller pieces to wrap around cages, preferring to keep it intact in long pieces I can use to cover an entire row if freezing temperatures threaten. 7. This is too often to fertilize plants. Weekly with a water-soluble fertilizer is probably more fertilizer than the plants need and can use. Overfeeding plants seems to produce plants that attract more pests (especially aphids), so even if I were to feed my plants with a water soluble fertilizer during the growing season, which I generally do not, I wouldn't do it this often. I probably would follow the directions on the package if they say to feed every other week and, even if they recommended weekly feeding, I still think I probably wouldn't do it that often. There can be specific instances in which a water-soluble fertilizer might be helpful, i.e., when excess moisture is impeding nutrient uptake and you can, in that case, get nutrients directly to the foliage by foliar feeding, or when a cool, rainy spell is forecast to arrive once very hot weather has set in and is causing blossom drop, equaling no fruit set. When that is occurring, if you use a Super Bloom type water-soluble fertilizer and water a few days in advance of the cool, rainy spell, you have your plants primed to bloom during the cool spell and may get fruit set during that brief period of time when temperatures fall back into the right range for fruit set. Please note that I am referring to plants grown in the ground in actual soil. If you are growing tomato plants in containers, the feeding regimen is much different, largely due to nutrients leaching out of the soil-less mix every time you water, which can be once or twice daily in hot summer weather, and up to three times daily if daily high temperatures are exceeding 105 to 110 degrees. 8. Fertilizing plants after the first big round of fruit set is pretty much a standard recommendation, but I use organic fertilizers with much lower nitrogen that what you have in ammonium nitrate. It all gets back to plant health and soil health and I avoid overfeeding with nitrogen above all else. 9. There's nothing wrong with this recommendation. Once the fruit have begun to break color, the process for developing full flavor is fully complete and the fruit will color up just fine and have the same great flavor if allowed to color up indoors. I often harvest fruit at first blush or just after the breaker stage, but not always. It is a matter of personal choice. If I'm not having pest issues (like hornworms or fruitworms eating fruit, birds pecking fruit, stink bugs stinging fruit, etc.), I often let the fruit, especially in April, May and early June, ripen fully on the vine. Later in the season, when sunscald is more of an issue, I harvest at first blush. Often, on any given day, I just do whatever seems most convenient for my schedule that week. You also have to consider the effect of air temperaure on fruit color. Once we are hitting temperatures above 85 degrees, the heat can cause a color change in the ripening process where the fruit doesn't color up as vividly as before. For example, a normally bright red tomato variety might only ripen to a reddish yellow or a reddish orange or even a pinkish red, confusing a less experienced gardener who continues to leave it on the plant waiting for the full red color that simply isn't going to develop in high heat. This can result in the fruit being over-ripe and mushy by the time the gardener gives up waiting for the red full color and harvests it. It isn't that you have to wait until a tomato is fully ripe to harvest it and eat it. You have to experiment and find the flavor that works best for you. Some folks like to eat what I consider barely ripe tomatoes that have a more strong, tart flavor at that stage (and often a firmer texture) while others like to eat tomatoes that are very ripe---almost over-ripe. I like them right at the peak of perfection, but since we grow a lot, it is hard to eat them all when they are right at their peak. With a select handful of varieties known as long-keepers, you actually harvest them green on purpose (generally in late autumn), wrap them in paper and store them in cool, dry conditions, wher they will continue to color up and ripen slowly over time, giving you fresh tomatoes in winter. 10. I totally agree with this one. Refrigerating fresh, home-grown tomatoes turns them into reasonable fascimiles of poorly-flavored, mealy, mushy-textured grocery store tomatoes, which I find unacceptable. If you find this acceptable, you can just skip growing your own and go buy grocery store tomatoes. I never put fresh tomatoes in the refrigerator. Never. If you absolutely, positively must refrigerate a home-grown tomato, remove it from the refrigerator and let it warm up to room temperature before serving it, and it may regain a little of its prior texture. At our house, if someone puts a tomato in the refrigerator, I am not a happy camper. I am highly skeptical that a person could get 50-80 lbs of tomato per plant even using all the listed methods in the Pinterest link, especially in our climate where the air temperatures largely control what plants can and cannot do with regard to fruit set. There is nothing we can do to make plants set fruit once temperatures are at a certain level, so you'll spend a lot of time fertilizing with poor results during hot weather anyhow, and the over-reliance and over-use of chemical fertilizers will harm your soil's microbial life. Because everything I do in the garden is focusing on developing good, healthy soil teeming with microorganisms, I am not going to do anything that will harm them. I am in this for the long haul and want our soil to be healthy and productive for all our lives, so I'm not going to use heavy amounts of fertilizer in order to get a short-term high yield since it means sacrificing soil (and sometimes plant) health. My goal is, and always has been, to leave the soil in better condition at the end of each growing season than it was the year before. We started out with horrid, highly compacted, slow-draining, tight red clay soil and I knew it wouldn't get better overnight. Fixing soil like that so that it gets healthy and can sustain plant life is a long, slow process. Using heavy amounts of synthetic fertilizer is diametrically opposed to my goals of having healthy, living soil, so I just don't do it. If that means a lower yield per plant, I'm okay with that. The amount of fruit a given gardener gets per plant will vary each year, depending on the soil health and the climate/weather conditions in which they are growing. It will be different for each variety as some varieties naturally bear more fruit than others. I'm all about quality but also want a decent quantity of fruit. I learned years ago that some varieties produce huge yields.....yes, they do, and guess what, they mostly produce huge yields of what our family considers poorly-flavored, poorly-texured garbage. I'm not going to feed my family inferior tomatoes just so we can have tons of them. My goal is tons of great tomatoes, not tons of reasonable facsimiles of tomatoes. I guess whether a person chooses to use this high yield process depends on whether having a lot of tomatoes is most important to them or whether having healthy soil and great-tasting tomatoes is most important. Y'all know where I stand on those issues. Dawn