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Planting seeds and raising seedlings are two of my favourite springtime activities. Little tomato and pepper seedlings are already raising their heads, along with heartsease, calendula, basil, parsley, tomatillo and numerous others.

These are the tomato varieties we are growing again for a second time this year:

Moneymaker — a medium-sized red tomato that cropped really well for us last year and proved pretty blight resistant. Delicious flavour!
Russian Red — another medium-sized red tomato. Last year it also proved tasty, a good cropper, and pretty blight resistant. It’s semi-determinate and fairly compact, which means less work delateralling.

We are also trying the following varieties for the first time this season:

Gardener’s Delight (also known as Sugar Lump) — a cherry tomato that is meant to bear prolific crops of sweet and delicious fruit.
Green Zebra — a green stripy medium-sized slicer. I grew this one in California for a couple of years, and found it delicious and hardy. The fruit also look beautiful. We’ll see how it fares here in our much more humid conditions.
Humboltti — I got this packet as a freebie from Koanga Gardens. The fruit are meant to be small and yellow with pointed ends, and great taste.

The Farmlet wizardress in action

There are so many wonderful-looking tomato varieties listed in the seed catalogues that it’s hard to choose which ones to try. I struggle to exercise a bit of restraint and to stay mindful of how much space we actually have in our garden! I hope we’ve made good choices for this season. Now we are busy clearing and preparing garden beds so that we’ll be ready when it comes time to transfer the little seedlings to the garden.

Peas and lettuces have already been planted out. The lettuces are doing well, and we have just enjoyed the first leaves for our dinner — in a salad with beets and corn salad (also from the garden). I have finished erecting protective tent-like canopies made of marix cloth over the rows of peas. Now we hope they will be able to recover from the damage done to them by the large family of brown quail who like to visit the garden.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 3:44 am and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.