New to Gardening

[pandorathewise]

 Hi guys, I'm new to gardening and new to this livejournal community.  But I do have some childhood experience with my Mother's gardening, but I was much too small at the time to really absorb all of the information that came from this experience.. so I don't count it.  I also tried to plant things a few years ago, but that didn't go so well as the

Comments

[low_delta]

Your LJ cut isn't working.

I have a Mr. Stripey. The bush is huge, but it has few fruits, and they're still very green. They're slow. I am getting cherry tomatoes. Two months sounds about right, for those. But I'm in Wisconsin. Don't know what normal is for your area. Water a lot. You'll know if they're getting too much water when they start to split. If they split, eat them. I'd do like you're doing. Pool the water around them. Especially when young. They need deep watering.

[pandorathewise]

Fixed the LJ cut, sorry about that.

And Thank you for responding!

I planted the Mr. Stripey in the ground in the beginning of July; how long did it take between the time you planted yours and you started seeing fruit? I was stunned when our Solar Fire (a heat resistant hybrid tomato plant) started baring fruit so soon, but now I'm worried about the fact that Mr. Stripey hasn't really started to fruit yet. It will be nice here (California) for a while, so it has time to still bare fruit.. but right now I've got more Mr. Stripey plant than I have Solar Fire plant. As you can see from the pictures, and in the last few days, the Mr. Stripey has gotten huge!

[low_delta]

I planted the tomatoes the first week in June (they were foot-high, at that point). I started getting cherries from them in mid-August. Two and a half months. Stripeys are still green, but like I said, they're a fairly slow variety. First frost comes some time in September, so I won't be doing them again.

Tomatoes require cool temps at night, and warm temps in the day time, in order to set fruit. I can't remember the numbers, but I think it's below 70° at night, and above 80° in the day. I'm disappointed in Mr. Stripey, because I think we had that all summer. Maybe we didn't have any bees, early on?

You should be able to buy bags of compost or composted manure at a garden center.

[pandorathewise]

I know I didn't have any bees early on, we're just now swarmed with the guys! They are going nuts all over my pumpkin and zucchini flowers. So that just might be one of the many problems I've encountered this year with Mr. Stripey.

Glad to know that my tomatoes aren't really stalled or something, its only been a month, I believe, since the plant started to grow the fruit. So I won't lose hope! Thank you for your reassurance.

Will look for compost at a garden center, I saw mulch and a few other things, but I didn't specifically look for compost.. but I'm sure they must have it.

[low_delta]

Do you do your own composting? It doesn't look like you have a big enough yard to have much to put in it, but you can also compost a lot of household waste. You don't need much - it just may take forever to get anything. But it's better than just throwing the stuff in the landfill. At the end of the season, when everything is dying off, pull it up, maybe chop the vines, and throw it in a pile. If it ever turns to dirt, mix it into your garden. :-)

If lack of pollinators is a problem, I imagine you could hand pollinate.

[pandorathewise]

I'm actually not composting yet. I have a bit of a bigger yard, we have a little more space behind the perspective where I was taking the picture (total backyard size is 11ft x 49ft). But we had some flooding last year, and I was a little hesitant to touch the rest of the yard for fear of messing up drainage too much. But I think next year I'll try composting.

I did hand pollinate my Zucchini's and Pumpkins a bit, but I'm not sure how to do it for the tomatoes. BUT, this past week our yard has slowly gained some bees buzzing around, couple days ago I saw three, today I went out in the yard and I easily had 10 or more buzzing around my flowers. We have pretty good weather year round, so I'm hoping that maybe that will actually yield something in the following months.