Friday, February 20, 2009

Time to start thinking about tomatoes.....


I received a seed catalog a few days ago. A seed company has my email address and they send me offers every two weeks and I do believe it is time to get some tomato seeds ordered. My father in law, 98 yrs. old, who lives with us, became entertained with growing them in his large east window of his bedroom. I suggested it to keep him busy and he fell for it, so the last four years or more, he has grown my seed for me into eight to ten inch high tomato plants. I use to give him three packets or maybe four and we would end up with 100 or more plants, so last year I limited him to two packets of seed and we still had sixty plants or more. His eyesight has worsened this past year so I will probably have to plant them for him. He has a large planter of red blooming geraniums in his windows and we need to move that somewhere else.
I always like to have the heirloom variety, Brandywine, and he always wants Best Boy or Better Boy. I have been so disappointed with the yellow varieties as they have a lemon flavor rather than the old fashion sweet tomato flavor. My wife and I like to grow the Roma variety also, and one year we had so many that we gave many of them away.
Secretly, I would like to buy a bunch of seeds of the heirloom kind and grow plants and sell them to the community. I was asked last year if I had any heirloom varieties that they could have. I really don't think there is a market for it, so it is a pipe dream.
Anyway, I need to finalize the wish list. Maybe I will limit Clarence to ten seeds per variety and I will order four or five kinds. We have snow predicted and thirty mile an hour winds to come this evening, but seeds need to be started by the middle of March so we can get them in the ground by first or second week of April.
I follow a blog from over in England and they are planning gardens right now and have crocus blooming, and are ready to plant potatoes. I suppose it is the island effect that keeps them a little warmer. We get the arctic winds directly through Canada and the earth is going to have to tilt a lot more before we stop getting blessed by them. I would like to grow the golden yellow variety of potato this year. It will be another month before I can even think about tilling the garden.Think spring, Iowans, think spring. Thanks for reading.

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