This is what our tomato field looked like hours before the first freeze.
… And here is what it looked like the next morning. Good thing we picked all the tomatoes!
And here is what the high tunnel looked like after it got down to 28 degrees – warm and balmy inside! Amazing!
Looks like we will have tomatoes a while longer.
One tiny tomato blossom (not even open yet)! Many more to come … hopefully SOON!
We have already had our first tomato crisis of the year. A few days after planting our high tunnel tomatoes, nearly two-thirds of them were dead. I came to discover that roly poly’s … that’s right, those cute little bugs your kids love to play with … were to blame.
With nothing else around the to eat, they were chewing through the stems of every tomato plant they could find. And we had HUNDREDS of roly polys.
Not good.
We replaced the dead plants and when planting our new ones, we put cans or buckets around them to hopefully make a barrier and keep the little suckers out. I think I’ve heard of other people doing this. Hope it works.
Oh, and we are heavily using diatomaceous earth around the plants , which roly polys hate. That seems to be working so far.
Last weekend we discovered that even the plants that lived had been damaged. We are trying to save them by adding cuffs around those plants and building up the soil inside.
First tomato crisis of the season. Probably won’t be the last.
We had planned to plant our high tunnel tomatoes this past weekend, but with the forecast for Sunday night a measly 23 degrees, we decided it was too risky. (And it did indeed get down to 23 last night.)
So tonight was the night. We got three of the four rows planted …. Whew! That was some quick planting!
Okay, so it looks darker in this picture than it really was, but we were out there at sunset.
We got the black mulch down on Saturday, and our jugs filled with water, so we were just all ready to plant. Now, just pray for warm nights!!
With as windy as it has been this winter, we were starting to get a little stressed about getting the plastic back on the high tunnel. So, when we had a near dead calm last Saturday morning, we rallied the troops and got it done.
Relief! Only a few more weeks til planting!
