planting out the tomatoes

The beds are made and the weather is looking fine so, even though we're one week before the magical Show Day cutoff (for all you non-Tasmanians, it is traditional to plant out tomatoes after the Royal Hobart show day, in the third week of October, as this roughly corresponds to the last frosts), we decided to take a minor gamble and plant out half of our seedlings and keep the other half as backups in pots in the poly cloche.


To minimise our risk even further, we covered each seedling with a cut-off 2 litre plastic juice bottle, to be removed when we're feeling extra brave given that we are prone to frosts sitting in a cool air drainage as we are.



You can also see that we use one dripper per plant and this drips into a shallow well in the soil.
It's hard to see from the picture but there are 23 plants of various heirloom variety in this row.

1 week later we removed the plastic bottles because of good weather and the plants were hitting the rooves. One more week later and we planted out the remaining seedlings - a further 24 plants. You might think this is a lot of tomatoes but it's not because we bottle (this is the sauce I used in the mushroom pasta dish), freeze and dry enough tomatoes so that we never need to buy any tomato products. Our stuff tastes much better than that Italian stuff and it's only travelled about 30 metres to the kitchen! This year we might sell any excess locally.

They're all growing rapidly so I'll need to start trellising them soon.