And It Begins - Garden 2010

I got a call from The Tomato Man on Saturday, and the word was: It's time to plant! I headed over to his half acre farm - - it's a town farm - - and found him and a teen aged helper digging in the dirt. By the end of the day, he'd have a couple hundred tomatoes in the ground.




My aspirations were much more modest - - I asked for twelve plants, well behaved and prolific, if you please. I don't want a repeat of '08, when I had the most beautiful plants of all time, and like, three tomatoes the entire season.

We stepped into Phil's 4'x8' greenhouse, filled to the rafters with eighty (80!!) varieties of heirloom and specialty hybrid plants. Phil raises these youngsters first in his kitchen, then moves to the greenhouse once weather permits. He rotates them religiously, up and down the shelves, to the front, to the back, checking their progress several times a day.

Phil carefully selected a dozen plants for me, explaining the characteristics of each as he placed them in a box. "This one dates back to Thomas Jefferson," he'd say. Not sure what that means to me and my BLT, except I might be eating the same salad as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, which is pretty darn cool in my book.

At the end of my visit, I went home with a Great White (big & white, just like the name), a Brandy Glick (some sort of Bradywine variety), an "Earl of Edgecomb" (a particularly flavorful orange heirloom), a "Ferris Wheel" (looks like a ferris wheel when you cut into it!), a "Marizold Red" (Phil had never tried, but said you couldn't go wrong with a Marizold family heirloom), a "Ding Wall Scotty" (a mid-sized red that grows in clusters), a "Pineapple Fog" (hybrid mixing a Pineapple yellow tomato and a San Francisco Fog), a "Mule Team" (like a work horse, keeps on producing and producing!!), and a Limmony (light yellow in color).

Twenty-four hours later, after my sweet husband plowed up my garden, I had the tomatoes plus a few assorted peppers buried up to their little necks in my garden, wondering what happened to the Holiday Greenhouse Spa and Resort. I planted them just as the Tomato Man Phil instructed me last year - - deep hole, a shovel full of organic compost, about a gallon of water, then plant the tomato up to its neck, burying a good 2/3 of the vine and leaves. I won't have to water for about a week.

I've checked on my garden each evening after working all day with the Lake Wylie real estate man, David Coone. With this warm weather, we're staying quite busy! Check on my other blogs about Lake Wylie waterfront and living in Lake Wylie on TheLakeWylieMan.com. Have a glorious day!