Garden Stories, Tomato Plants in My Garden

Hello, steemies and garden lovers!

In my last post, I showed you the tomato plants in my greenhouse. In this post, I'd like to show you the tomato plants that I grew in my back yard garden.

I started the garden tomato plants in the greenhouse and kept them in there until it was warm enough to transplant them outside in my garden. On nice days in May, I would bring the plants outside for the day to get used to the sun.
Here they are, enjoying the spring sunshine.

I decided to start planting my outdoor tomato plants in late May. I planted 4 paste type tomato plants in my low raised bed. I was hoping the frost would not kill them, but I was willing to cover them at night just in case. The red things around the plants are called "tomato craters". They're supposed to keep cut worms from getting to the young plants, and their red color is supposed to help the plant grow because of reflected sunlight.

I decided to plant the rest of the tomato plants in the garden during the first week of June. I had enough plants for 3 rows.

By the end of June, the plants were growing really well.

By the end of July, the plants were large, and were flowering and growing tomatoes.

By the middle of August, I had a lot of large tomatoes on the plants, and a few were getting ripe.

I picked my first ripe tomatoes from the plants at about this time. These are Black Krim tomatoes. I also trimmed the tops of the plants to keep them from getting too tall, and to hopefully make them more productive.

By the third week of August, I was seeing a lot of tomatoes getting ripe.

This row of tomatoes are the Amana Orange variety, they ripen to an orange color, not red. As you can see, I plant marigolds with my tomato plants. They help with bug control.

The paste tomatoes were also getting ripe.

Here's a couple of pictures of the tomatoes that I picked at the end of August. These plants were nicely productive at that time.

There was still a lot of unripe tomatoes on the plants after that picking.

I still had a fair amount of tomatoes getting ripe at the middle of September.

At the beginning of October, we had not yet gotten our first night time frost, and some of the tomato plants were still producing ripe tomatoes. By this time, some of the plants had finished producing their last ripe tomatoes and I had removed the plants. I had taken out most of the plants on the first row, and half the plants on the second row. The plants in the third row were starting to die back from late blight, but they still were ripening the tomatoes.

The paste tomato plants were still hanging onto some of their tomatoes also.

After the beginning of October, the tomato plants started mostly dieing back, so I picked what I could of the tomatoes that were ripe or getting ripe. Then I started removing the rest of the plants to start the fall garden cleanup.

This was a very productive garden season for me with tomato plants. I think this might be the best year I've had for tomatoes in the past 5 years, I was able to can a lot of tomatoes, and make more tomato sauce than I've done in the past.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!