Start of the Season, Planting Tomatoes

For the winter long, I’ve been waiting until this moment. The end of February, almost March, when the temperatures are getting higher, and almost no chances of frost in the night, it’s time to start the garden for this season. As you can see in the graph below, for the last couple of weeks, the average temperature has been climbing steadily, and I deem it’s time to put in some tomatoes for a big harvest this year.

Temperature graph in Pleasanton, metrics through Ambient Weather Station

This Sunday morning, there was time for some garden therapy, with lots of preparation before we can plant. For month, we have been recycling coffee filters, egg shells, fruit and vegetable scraps from the kitchen in the Composting bin.

Last summer I even bought a bunch of worms for better composting. For the last couple of weeks, we have not added any more scraps, since we really needed to get the compost ready for the planting in spring. The worms have been multiplying to a large numbers I even think I can start a worm farm now.

So, the potting mix I’ve used last year, can be re-used in a mix with this years compost and some new potting mix. This way we get a potent mix to grow our veggies in this year, and don’t have to buy that much new potting mix.

And with some newly bought, fresh cherry tomato pack and a mild chili pepper variety pack at the Home Depot, we have a good start in the garden for an early harvest. 

And for a later harvest, we have planted seeds in the little mini greenhouses. This was, we will get a wave of fruit & vegetables throughout the summer. In the greenhouses, we have organic heirloom tomatoes, Cherokee Purple to be exact, and organic beefsteak tomatoes. To get enough bees coming to visit the garden, we also started with around 12 sunflower seeds, from two different kinds; the Mammoth Sunflower and the Solar Eclipse.