Catching Up: Tomato Plants!

It's been a few years since I've bothered to grow any edibles, even though in my opinion one of the best things about summer gardening is a homegrown tomato. The deer and woodchucks and inconvenience of the fenced veggie garden being so far away from the kitchen door just made it too much of a hassle though, so I gave up on it.

Until this year that is, when I decided that the deck would be a great place to grow tomatoes! I planted up six large pots, each holding a different variety. I was quite pleased with the results.

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Tomato plants are not the most attractive of ornamentals, but when they're going strong they're not exactly ugly, at least to my eye.

Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Sweet Millions (cherry), Celebrity, and a couple of other ones that I don't remember exact names for, but won't grow again.

Since we had a very wet start to summer (and middle of summer for that matter), watering was not too much of a chore. Since running a hose up to the deck last year this has become almost "easy" anyways, but I didn't have to do it too much until later in the summer.

So no problems with deer or woodchucks, but...

...those darn raccoons!  I ended up installing a motion-activated light, and that seemed to do the trick. That light showed us that it wasn't just raccoons that love tomatoes, but opossums do too apparently!

We got lots of delicious tomatoes from these plants until midsummer when I neglected to fertilize and the fruits started getting weird (looking ripe on the outside but pretty much green inside). I'll be more persistent next year -- I'm definitely doing this again next year!

(These photos were taken at the end of July)

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