Dawn you always have the first tomato, LOL. This year i tried to beat ya. I started a bush tomato in the greenhouse, can remember which, but anyways it has a few golf ball sized on it now.

Mike, Oh, you know I don't do it to be first, right? I do it because I am a tomato hog. That's right. A full-fledged Tomato Hawg, Pig, Piglet, you name it, and Tim is too. We merely want to eat fresh, yummy, home-grown tomatoes for as many months of the year as possible.

I wouldn't have minded if you'd beaten me because it is an internal contest for me....a contest to try to have tomatoes earlier each year than we had them the previous year. That's all. I would have been happy for you (and green with envy!) if you'd had the first tomato.

Your golf ball-sized fruit will enlarge and ripen soon. I'm sure of it. Mine have been helped along by a lot of insanely hot days when our highs have been in the mid- to upper-80s, which I hope is not an omen of the summer weather to come. Also, the stores had them February 1st instead of in mid-February, and that helped too. I don't think I could have gotten a ripe tomato this early if the plants had arrived in the stores two weeks later.

Keep us posted on your first tomatoes, and we'll celebrate along with you when you are getting to harvest and eat them.

Dawn

Everybody load up and head south to Dawn's. Come on let's go! BLTs for everybody this weekend!

I will get my earliest tomato ever this year. The largest one is about golf ball size right now. I planted them in mid February in wall o waters. I can't wait for my first BLT.

Scott, I'm not sure how far we can stretch a couple of Early Girl tomatoes, unless we get a miracle of some sort.

kylanjovan, Congrats on having fruit that far along already. That's terrific. I've been growing early plants in containers for about a decade now and we always get our first tomatoes in April, though not usually quite this early. Once you get used to having tomatoes in April, you'll always want to have a few early plants so you can start eating fresh tomatoes sooner.

I'd use WOWs if I could, but our entire property slopes downhill and when you try to fill up a WOW on what seems to be a fairly level spot in the garden, it falls over and rolls downhill, which isn't good for the tomato plant you're trying to put the WOW around. I learned that lesson a long time ago---I may be able to make a raised bed that looks flat and level at the surface in the sloping garden, but it isn't really flat or level. Our house and outbuildings occupy the only relatively flat ground. Maybe we should have built on the sloping ground and saved the flat area for the garden, but it's too late now.

Dawn

I really love using WOWs especially with our erratic weather. I can plant early without worrying about frost. The only thing I hate about them is cleaning them out when I'm done using them for the season.

One of our neighbors in Texas used WOWs to plant his tomato plants in late January or early February in zone 8 many years ago. He would use some sort of stakes inside to keep them from collapsing inward so that he could stack a second WOW on top of the first as his plants quickly outgrew the first WOW. I have no idea how he got them off his plants once the plants were growing out of the top of the second WOW, but once he removed the WOWs, the tomatoes were very wide and bushy as if the WOW had kept them closed up and cramped (but alive). One day he'd have these tall, narrow-looking plants peering over the top of the second WOW and then, suddenly, you'd notice the next day that the WOWs were gone and he had huge tomato plants early in the season.

I finally looked up the WOW. Pricey but if you only have a few I would do it. So far I have 39 in the ground with a can to help keep the 40 mph winds from breaking them I have tons of blooms and they are about a foot tall. If it comes a late freeze I am not sure what I will do. I have about 60 more in pots going in today with the wind and heat I can't keep enough water on them.

I have decided I should experiment with ways to get tomatoes in the ground earlier. Years like this, with just a few frosts, would be pretty easy to cover them. But as soon as I plant early we will have an awful spring. I started mine about the same time as last year. Last year they were huge and the ground was too wet to plant. This year my main crop tomatoes may get too hot. It's always something.

Stacking two WOWs sounds like a difficult balancing act. I think it's easier to cover the tops growing out of the WOW with frost blankets that I cut into smaller pieces.

The WOWs I bought were from planetnatural.com that's the best price I could find online. I like to order other things from them so shipping is not a factor but if you only order the WOWs they would be expensive with the shipping cost factored in. I have never been able to find them locally.

For this season I wanted to experiment with getting early tomatoes with the WOWs. The plants for the WOWs that I planted in mid-February were started from seed in November. I have a "growing cabinet" in my unheated garage since I have no space inside my house. I can keep the temperature at about 50-70 degrees during winter so they do grow but rather slowly. I planted 10 tomato seedling in the WOWs in February.

About the time I'm planting the early tomatoes is when I started the rest of my tomatoes plants from seed that won't get the protection from WOWs. Those are the ones I've been planting this week. I don't use them for all my tomatoes but it's definitely worth doing it on a few plants to get early tomatoes.

kylanjoban - I have tried WOW and hated them because the birds see the water and land on the WOW to try to drink and it collapses them and takes the plant down with it. I had never thought of trying to cover the top. Do you leave the WOW top closed together or opened wide? Do you have a picture? That is an interesting idea. I think I have 6 Wall's of Water stored somewhere because I gave up on using them. It isn't as if the birds need water because I live a block from Grand Lake, but I do have a ton of birds.

Maybe I'm lucky and have the right conditions for using WOWs. I have a flat garden and even though birds constantly visit my garden I have never seen one try land on a WOW to drink from it. I do have a bird bath that I try to keep water in so I don't know if that is what makes a difference.

I've been taking the WOWs off this week because they were looking cramped and I was worried that the stems weren't getting strong since it's not being exposed to the elements.

This picture was taken 1-2 weeks after planting. I didn't fill it all the way so the tops stay closed.

This is about 3 weeks after planting after we had lots of rain.

This is about 5 weeks after planting. I got a bad frost soon after this picture was taken. The forecasted 37 went down to 30 and I didn't cover them. I had to cut off all the tops that were exposed because of frost damage. The part of the plants inside the WOWs were fine.

These are the tomato plants today almost two months after planting.

Kim, Y'all aren't safely past the possibility of a late frost yet? There's lots of things you can do....just throw some sort of textile over the plants and use something heavy to weight down the edges. Anything is better than nothing. I've used bed sheets, curtains, table cloths, quilts, etc. in the distant past before I bought and started using row cover. Textiles are better than plastic, but plastic and tarps can work as long as they are suspended above the plants and don't touch them (anywhere the plastic touches a plant, it conducts the cold directly to that plant part and you get a damaged or dead plant). We're two weeks past our average last freeze date, but we have had late frosts as late as May 3rd and May 4th in about half the years we've been here, so I never really relax and feel the plants are truly safe from a late cold night until we're halfway through the first week of May.

kylanjovan, The plants look great. If I had level ground, I'd happily use the WOWs. I do have a lot of row cover and do use it to put some plants in the ground early, but this year we had so many recurring late cold nights despite blistering hot days that I mostly just waited for the weather to level out before I put my own home-grown plants in the ground. I've got about half my tomato plant space filled, and will fill up the rest of it this week. I've been sidetracked somewhat by the planting of beans, corn and cucumbers the last couple of weeks, the effort to keep all the planted areas weed-free, planting tons of flowers and the harvesting of copious amounts of cool-season stuff. I don't want to whine, but I am getting sick of asparagus, spinach, lettuce, collards and kale. I'm ready to move on to harvesting, eating and preserving other stuff. I like everything I grow, but I love tomatoes, so I fantasize about yanking out all the cool-season stuff and planting nothing but tomatoes. I won't do it though. Man (and woman) cannot live by tomatoes alone. I cannot even imagine the look on my DH's face if he came home from work and saw I had yanked out row after row of perfectly healthy, happy, cool-season crops and replaced them all with tomato plants. One of these years I should just skip planting everything else and only grow my most favorite things: tomatoes, peppers, southern peas and melons.

Dawn

We should be close. Because I am in valley the surrounding weather and zones are different. We actually are a lot warmer. I just don't want to take any chances. Several locals said we have had a freeze as late as Bob Wills weekend which is always the last one in April.

I think someone - probably Dawn - mentioned cardboard boxes, too. Once you no longer need them for covering plants, lay them on the ground for mulching, or eliminating weeds. I tell you, this is the best way to get, draw, grow worms in your soil! Nothing else has ever worked quite so well for me.

Susan

A freeze that late wouldn't surprise me. We've had them the first week of May and we're a bit further south than you are. Weather in the Southern Plains is crazy this time of year.

I do love cardboard. I hoard cardboard, saving it all year long, to use in the garden. It drives Tim and Chris crazy. When a package arrives, I'm breathing down their necks, wanting them to open whatever they ordered so I can have the cardboard.

Lol. Me too and I have access at work to 100s of boxes every week.

Ok,question? Dawn, do you layer the cardboard or cut it down to a single layer? It sounds like it would be to thick for water to penetrate and when it did the ground would hold to much water. Do you cover it with mulch? I would like to try it, I always have boxes around.

Have you used paper sacks? Are they as good as cardboard?

How heavy I layer it depends on where I'm putting it and also on the thickness of the cardboard. I do put mulch on top of it. Otherwise, the Oklahoma winds will blow the cardboard away. I use it everywhere, but especially in places where I want to smother out grass and weeds. It is ideal for starting new beds because it attracts earthworms like crazy. Sometimes I put it in my compost pile and heap compost on top of it so the worms can digest the cardboard and break it down. I like to put it in garden pathways to keep the weeds down, and I just heap mulch (often just grass clippings, old spoiled hay or chopped/shredded autumn leaves) on top of it. I always wet down the cardboard and the mulch really well as soon as I put it down on the ground.

If you want to prepare an area now for planting in a few months (or next year) just put down several layers of thick cardboard with mulch on top. After a few months, the cardboard will have decomposed and the soil beneath should be nice and fluffy because of the earthworms. Cardboard is an earthworm magnet.

Have you ever used it in an established bed? Like around the flowers and shrubs to help enrich the soil?

Yes, I just place it on the ground around the trees and shrubs and pile on the mulch. The cardboard usually is gone in a couple of months, which I assume is partly from decomposition and partly from the earthworms eating it.

Congrats Dawn,

You're always first because you work so hard for it! I'm just happy to have plants blooming. This is a Cherokee Purple plant that I set in on March 15th. I went out in the rain this morning to check on things and found the possible first fruit set on it as the sepals on one bloom had pulled all the way back and the flower was fading.

For those who might be new here, I'm adding a link for timeline of a tomato truss.Timeline of a tomato truss

Keith

Hi Keith, Thanks. It is work to get the first ones so early, but you know just how tomato obsessed I am. We ate those first two as if they were precious and made of gold---letting them sit on the counter until fully, deeply ripe and the anticipation almost killed us. Finally, we got to gobble them up. Now, there's two more sitting there that are next in line to become BLTs.

Congrats on the first fruit set. It seems odd to me that it is on Cherokee Purple, unless you didn't plant Fourth of July this year? I would have expected 4th of July to beat CP, but then sometimes strange things happen in the tomato world. I'm delighted to see how early you got some tomato plants in the ground. I feel like early planting always pays off as long as you can protect them from the cold. (And, well, here in OK, that means also protecting them from wildfires, hail, tornadoes, strong winds, floods, thunderstorms, torrential rainfall....and dust storms.....and that is just in March and April.)

We now have 78 tomato plants growing---76 in the ground and the two Bush Early Girls in containers. I have room for a few more in the front garden, so I'm not really finished planting yet but I decided to wait for the Noah's Ark flood to pass before putting any more plants in the ground.

The rain here has not yet really materialized in as large of an amount as forecast, but I'm good with that. I was worried about too much rain after all that rain fell last year. And, of course, now it probably will rain 3 or 4" overnight and tomorrow just because I don't want more rain.

I know you'll be eating yummy fruit before you know it!

For anyone new to the linked timeline of a tomato truss (one of my alltime favorite links for years now), please remember it is for one specific variety. Different varieties will move a little slower or faster, and weather conditions also can speed things up, or slow them down. DTMs are, as always, an estimate only.

Dawn

Yes, I do have 4th of July plants this year. You might remember that I start seed for my indeterminates on Dec. 20th, Winter solstace, then pinch the 4th true leaf after it emerges. I've done this for several years now and I'm absolutely certain that I get earlier production and therefore more production from those plants, Besides promoting stronger root growth, this triggers the suckering process which gives me transplants with 2-3 central leaders instead of one. The 4th of July seed I started in Dec. didn't germinate well and those that did damped off. I had to start more seed 3 weeks later, didn't pinch them and they went in the ground on March 25th. They have buds but no blooms yet.

This is the first time I've grown Cherokee Purple. I've heard ya'll sing it's praises for years and I'm really looking forward to enjoying it. Also new this year are Chocolate Cherry and German Johnson Pink.

So far our rainfall today has been just over an inch and like you I'm hoping to not get much more for this round. Last year I only salvaged a decent tomato harvest after the flood by taking cuttings and rooting them from very leggy plants I had left in the greenhouse and putting them out on June 21st.

If things dry out by the end of the week I have pepper plants begging to go out and I'll plant okra seed if the soil temps are warm enough.

Keith

I knew there had to be some reason you had another tomato producing ahead of Fourth of July. I hope Cherokee Purple does well for you. In a good year, it is just so yummy that you cannot believe it.

I had an odd tomato year last year. Our last freeze was extra early and our harvest was extra early, which was a good thing because we got far too much rain (24" in May alone, of which 12" fell in one day). I expected dead and dying tomato plants, poorly-flavored fruit and a low harvest. Instead, we had a remarkably good year, though there were some points in June and earliest July when the the rainfall did water down the flavor of the fruit some. Our flooding rains abruptly stopped in earliest July after what was then our third or fourth round of flooding, and then it didn't rain again for weeks and weeks. With very wet soil, the tomato plants tolerated the dry weeks very well and since temperatures were cooler than usual, the plants set fruit all summer long, which is so rare here that it almost never happens down here. I was shocked. The onions didn't tolerate the rain nearly as well and their crop was poor, but when that 24" of rain fell in May, I knew the onions were doomed. I'm just surprised the tomatoes were not equally doomed.

So far it has been a more normal rainfall year down here in 2016, and I was relieved when the heaviest rainfall this week fell in the NW corner of our county and not at our house. Of course, it rained most of the night here and I expect I'll find it very wet when I go outdoors this morning, but I still think our rain total for the last week will be under 3" at our house. It likely is 6-8" in the northwestern corner of the county, so I think 3" wouldn't be bad all things considered. Why can't we ever get just enough rain? It seems like rainfall in Oklahoma only comes in two quantities: too much or too little.

Got one fully ripe today. Amazing how flavorful they are. Had the first BLT of the year with a homegrown tomato. Hopefully many more to come!

Yay! I am so excited for you, Mike! Wasn't it yummy? Congrats on the early harvest.

We have become spoiled rotten the last few years due to the early tomato harvest, and all it does is make me even more obsessed with getting early tomatoes.

I noticed this year that the Bush Early Girl plants set fruit so low on the plants that the fruits kept rubbing against the edge of the container, which was giving them brown scars from the rubbing. Eventually, I bought that flexible foam insulation made to put around pipes so we could cut it into pieces to place around the edges of the pots, but by then we had a lot of scarred (and perfectly edible) fruit. Next year I'll put the insulation on the pots when I plant the Bush Early Girls.

We now have harvested about 30 fruit from 4 different early plants. We've never had that many this early before, and it has kept us eating BLTs steadily. Partly it is just that we bought Bush Early Girl this year instead of Early Girl because I knew from past experience that BEG seems to set a lot of fruit all at once very early in the season and I was greedy for that fruit, and partly because the weather was so warm in February and March. I think BEG's performance has knocked EG right off my grow list....except.....often EG goes on producing all season long in a more continuous pattern of production whereas BEG produces the most early on and then produces in spurts later on, but not so continuously as EG. So, maybe I'll always be able to find room for both Early Girl and Bush Early GIrl, but then there's also Early Doll too, which for me produces about the same as EG.

In one way, early tomatoes are the best, because our taste buds are so starved for the flavor of a home-grown tomato after months of not having any, but I still think the best flavor is from vine-ripened fruit in insanely hot (and dry) weather.