Shrub . the food forest and our tomatoes

The 34 tomato plants I transplanted into the garden yesterday was looking real good this evening. We started all our tomato plants from seed 25th of january and I think we have 55 plants in total. The tiny tims in the foreground of the picture have been providing us with tomatoes for a while already, Im very fond of this little bush plant with a huge amount of small tasty tomatoes. The Sub Arctic tomatoes in the background are just starting to turn colour, its a bigger variety that we had last year but we only had 7 seeds left in the package. I will use one of the first tomatoes that turned red and start some more plants and turn the rest into seeds for next year. Its a coldhardy fast maturing plant (50 days) so even if I start a batch now they should have enough time to give us a good harvest. We liked the size of these tomatoes and Brock froze a bunch that we been using for salsa and tomatoe sauses.

The sweetie tomatoes is a variety we had last year too and quite liked. These cherry tomatoes have a good flavour and we used them a lot in sallads last year. I planted 10 of them a couple of days ago but the plants have been struggling a bit in the heat. So today I dug down to where their roots are, watered and inserted a water bottle upside down. I had made holes in the cork and Brock helped me cut of the bottom of them. This way we will be able to get a slow soak to the roots and the bottles will collect water when it rains.

I have circled the water bottles, they are quite hard to see (did you notice the water bottle in the first picture?). This are the tiny tims (to the left) and the Sub arctic (right). I only put bottles by the Sub Arctic since we had a lot of trouble last year keeping them hydraded. I think our problem was that we had them in Ikea bags so they dried out real fast, but we dont want to loose any tomatoes to end rot this years so putting water bottles next to their roots to ensure they get enough water seemed like a good idea.

Brock have been working hard getting the paths filled with wood chips and we will mulch around the tomatoes with straw but we still got some more plants to plant. I will put ome of our basil around the tomatoes and plant our mini bellpepper plants with the tiny tims. Probably a couple of marigolds and ...hmthere was something else I was thinking about too.

Here is from a couple of days ago, our tiny tims posing with the freshly picked asparagus. We been able to sell a couple of bundles of asparagus a week now, we picked what we needed for ourselves and have sold the rest. It has felt real good that we been able to sell both asparagus and rhubarb already, both of us been working away at the garden and its quite inspiring to hear the appriciation people have for locally produced food.

Last year when we were scheeming up what we wanted to do with the food forest and garden this year and realized we wanted to sell produce - we came up with a company name for it. We will sell our products under the name Shrub. And since we started getting produce and actually selling it I sat down and did the logo for it. We are quite happy with how it turned out :D

So, as you can see, we are keeping busy. But its getting increasingly more difficult for me, anything I do in the garden puts me out of commision for a day or two. I´m at 32 weeks pregnant and the chronic pain is real bad, affecting my hands to the point where I can hardly use them (thats why I havent updated my blog in a long while, typing has been to painful), but Im still really enjoying gardening. I will try and do a update post about all the projects, a lot has happened in the last 2 weeks :)