Tomatoes - harvest soon ?

The fruits are growing - adding volume and weight ever so slowly.. its amazing how nature works, ...in small steps and with a mind of its own, you never know when a node will form, where a flower will grow. Its just amazing to know all these happened from a teeny little seed. wow !

Tomato - First fruits

The First fruits of tomatoes are showing up in few of the plants..

Harvest

The plant, flowers, and finally the pods!. First harvest in the garden of tasty okras, ready to move into the kitchen and quickly into the palate.

The tomatos are flowering.. veggie flowers are beautiful too!

Okra Flower

There was a couple days worth of good rain, surprise for this time of the year. It did help in bringing down the hot temperature, and this constant watering made the plants grow a bit quicker.

The Okra flower in bloom.

The Single Row roof garden, getting greener. The Tomato plants are growing in full flow. Need to plan for some sort of support for the tomatoes.

growth

A watched pot never boils. but it is hardly possible not to keep watching at the lovely seedlings (should I call them plants now?). Here are some in the pots. growing all the time.

Moving tomatos into paper pots

Following the instructions on the earlier post, I made some paper pots. They came out pretty good. They do have a solid bottom, making me wonder how long will it take to decompose.

Earlier I moved a few seedlings into the final clay pots directly. I have them on the rooftop now, in the shadow. Even then during the day, it gets pretty hot, and I am not sure if these will holdup to the heat.


While I am not sure about this, the seedlings in the original starter containers are now large enough to have a place of their own. I decided to use the paper pots that I made. I have moved about ten of them now. I have a dozen more seedlings.

planning to do that tommorrow.

Alright. It took me more than a day to patiently fill the paper pots and move the tomato seedlings one by one. I didn't realize that I had sown quite a plenty in each of the containers, and there was a mini bush in each one fo those.

most of the seedlings came out pretty well, so I had to accomodate as much as I can.

The difficult part was to untangle the roots of the many seedlings which had grown together.

After I moved all I could, I was still left with half a dozen seedlings, which I had to discard. Yet my count of tomato seedlings is now a whopping 29 !!

They are all in the roof now, braving the sun during the day, and the dew at night.

Tomato, The Queen of the Garden

There is very little cooking in South India without Tomatoes. The ever tasty Tomato Rasam is to be tasted to be believed. Since Tomatoes are common ingrediants, they can be happily consumed as much as we grow. So Tomato was the choice after Okra.

Again, I prepared the starting containers about half a dozen, sowed a pinch of seeds in each of them. Little did I realize that a small pinch contained about three to four seeds! and all of them grew! The seeds germinated in aournd four days. It was a joy to see tiny little baby leaves showing thier heads above the soil. soon the containers became crowded. I continued sprinkling water twice daily, I moved the containers from shade to sunlight, a place sun light falls for about four hours.

The true leaves came out in the second week. The tomato seedlings which looked a lot fragile, survived! They braved the rains and the sun, and are now ready to be transplanted. There are a little over a dozen seedlings. I thought of separating the seedlings into individual peat pots, that I have started to make, but the seedlings look ready enough to plant them in the larger clay pots.

This week I plan to expand the garden by adding a dozen clay pots and plant the tomato seedlings.

Beginning with Okra

The first Vegetable that I chose is my favourite. I love Okra in any form, particularly when it is made spicy such as Bindi Fry I can just keep on eating them. Apart from this little secret, the reason I chose Okra is it is relatively easy to grow in the hot South Indian climate.

I bought some Okra seeds, soaked them overnight. I took a handlful of small plastic containers (bags) filled them up with garden soil with a little bit of Bio Fertilizer, mainly vermi compost that I picked up from the local nursery. I put two seeds each, just in case. after three-four days I could see the germination happening. Infact most of the seeds germinated , meaning some containers would contain two seedlings. I let them grow like that, with partial sunlight. I exposed them directly to the atmosphere, and let them grow. I would sprinkle water twice daily.

The seedlings started to grow nice and overgrew the container in the second week. There was some unexpected rain that lashed for couple nights. luckily the seedlings that were left exposed survived!

Now in the third week, the seedlings are ready for transplant. Since this is a garden on the roof, my plan is to use portable containers such as clay pots for most of the plants. easy to move around, without worry of overloading the terrace with truck loads of soil. maybe someday I will do a little of that. For now, I obtained about a dozen clay pots, filled them up with garden soil and manure, both from the nursery. I am planning to use the nursery and other external resources for all such needs until such time I can make my own of anything.

I dug deep holes in the middle of the pot, took the Okra seedling with the soil from the plastic container, and planted them in the pot, made a tiny hill around the seedling, burying a litttle bit of the plant. The containers with two seedlings are the challenge, I removed both carefully after laying them down on the gound. separating the roots was done gently. Now all the seedlings are planted.

The kitchen garden has began.

Make your Own Peat Pot

When you get started on a garden with some seriousness, you want to get your plants started from the seed. so you got to have some sort of a nursery going. I found this neat idea on how we can make our own starting pots, the coolest thing is you can plant them directly, resulting in no transplant stress for the plant.

Source of the article

If anyone is interested, you can make your own little starting pots out of newspaper. The newspaper breaksdown like a peat pot. What you will need to make the little pots: Newspaper- use only the black and white pages not anyof the pages with color. Tomato Paste or any can size that is similar Small bottle of glue (non-toxic) or you could use aflour and water paste. Start by cutting the newspaper into three longsections, going from top to bottom. They should beabout equal size. Now take a strip and wind it aroundthe can just below the lip edge of the can. Wrap itsnug but not so tight as to where the paper will notslide off the can. There should be an overhang ofpaper at the other end of the can. We will deal withthat in a minuet. Dab a small amount of glue to theoutside edge where you finished off your strip ofpaper and attach another strip and finish off with alittle bit of glue to hold the paper down, a tiny bitwill work with a little pressure. Make sure that thetube you just made will slide off the can but don’tpull it off just yet. Fold the overhanging paper flatagainst the bottom of the can, like you fold the endof a package, but use only three folds if you can, dabwith a bit of glue so it will stay closed and slide itoff the can. Walla! You should have what looks like alittle newspaper tube, with one end closed, now,repeat the process until you have as many as you need.When I fill up these containers I usually sit themnext to each other to help keep them all upright. AndI set them in a container like a plastic shoebox or anempty meat container. They will hold up until you getyour new seedlings into the ground. They can be popped right into the ground as thenewspaper will breakdown as long as it is covered withdirt. Enjoy! Julia