Thirty-six degrees on Tuesday morning. I scraped a thin skin of frost off the Forester's windshield at 6:50 on May 12, two days after Mother's Day, and thought about the twelve tomato plants I'd carried back down to the basement the Friday before.
Mother's Day is my frost date. It's a rule of thumb, not a promise, and around here the average last frost lands somewhere between May 5 and 10. Most years the rule holds. This year a cold snap parked over us from May 8 to May 12, with nights in the 30s and a rainy birthday party for Mateo in the middle of it, and the rule lost. So the tomatoes went out today, May 16, once the snap had cleared, one day earlier on the calendar than last year's May 17.
Back inside for five nights
Hardening off started on May 3, with a couple of hours in morning shade on the porch and a little longer each day after. By May 7 they were spending whole afternoons outside. Then the forecast turned, and everything came back in. Five nights under the basement lights left them a little stretched, and some of the leaves had gone purple underneath from cold afternoons on the porch. They forgave me within a day of going back outside. I'd rather lose a week than lose a plant.
Ten plants, and the spacing I should have used all along
Last year I grew twelve tomatoes and jammed eight of them into the east bed, which is a bed built for six. By July I was weaving twine between stakes to keep it from collapsing, and then a maple limb came down on the corner. This year it's ten plants, and the six in the bed have room to breathe.
The east bed holds the garlic and 90 onions now, so the tomatoes rotated into the west bed: Cherokee Purple, two San Marzanos, Amish Paste, Early Girl and Sungold. The four buckets on the porch hold the cherries: Sungold, Juliet, Matt's Wild Cherry and Supersweet 100.
The spacing is two rows of three. The rows are about two feet apart, each roughly a foot in from the long sides of the bed, and the plants in each row are about 30 inches apart, starting 18 inches in from the ends. That leaves air moving between the plants and room for my arm to reach the middle without snapping anything. I drew it into the notebook in colored pencil at the kitchen table before I went out, and it looked almost empty on paper. It will not look empty in August.
Planting was the same as always. I stripped the lower leaves and buried each plant deep, about two-thirds of the stem, so it roots along the buried part. A handful of compost went into each hole and nothing else, since the soil test this spring said the beds have plenty of phosphorus and potassium. Then a tall stake beside each of the six. The drip line from April's water project runs along both rows, and the timer will handle the 6:00 a.m. watering. The two spare seedlings stay in their cups on the back steps until June, just in case.
Peppers on the porch
The peppers lived in the west bed last year. This year they're in nine fabric pots at the sunny end of the porch, the hottest spot we have: three ají dulce, two jalapeño, two shishito and two 'Carmen' sweet peppers. The ají dulce seed comes from my mom's plants, which go back to my Abuela Ana's coffee cans on a Bronx fire escape. Those are the ones I'd run back into a burning house for, and they got the best pots.
A bit of porch math for later. Kevin starts repairing the rotted southwest corner on June 1, and the buckets and pepper pots sit closest to it. For four days everything will shuffle down to the far end of the porch. Fabric pots are light. Five-gallon buckets full of wet soil are not, and Nate has been warned.
The tomatoes looked small and slightly startled in the west bed this afternoon, ten pale green plants in a lot of brown dirt. Pim watched the whole operation from the kitchen window.
Next year: I'm writing "rule of thumb" in red pencil right under Mother's Day in the notebook.
