Well, my toe is still not doing that great. I may have really broken it. If I rest it, it's OK. But if I walk around at all, it starts to get bruise-y again. I finally did chop back my tomatoes, though, on Saturday. I was brutal. You can see I pruned a lot. That poor tomato plant in the lower left....have you ever seen the King of the Hill episode where Peggy is hired to sub for a sex ed class, and she's practicing saying a certain word and Hank's getting all bothered about it while he's pruning the tree? That poor little tomato wound up that that. It's a goner. I'm thinking that if I was this brutal in the beginning I wouldn't be where I am now. I think that's what everybody needs to take away from my experience so far is that you need to go ahead and be brutal with your tomatoes in the beginning to get them to go where you want them to go. Don't wait until they're way up in the lights. Or, if you do, go ahead and prune. A lot. Early. I've decided I'm going to thin these plants down, keep one or two that are doing very well, and get rid of the rest. I may try to re-pot one, but due to the problems with a plant surviving the switch from hydro to soil I don't think it will end happily. I'm going to order some more seed pod things, maybe some peppers, maybe some without seeds that I can plant some of my seeds in. It would be interesting to see how the Echinacea does in the Aerogarden. I might try to start a pomegranate seed again, as a backup for the one that finally sprouted and seems to be doing OK. I want to eventually bonsai that one. That will be a project years in the making. From seed to bonsai tree. Wish me luck. At any rate, the tomato thing is going to go into a new stage pretty soon. I don't think I'm going to give up totally on tomatoes, but things are going to have to change a bit, I think. By the way, I decided the quilt I had under the Aerogarden needed a wash, so I put the aqua crochet doily under it again. I think it looks very nice. The jelly bean quit washed up very nicely, by the way. I was trying to decide whether to give it a light press or steam and forgot about it until just now. Ah well, that's a project for tomorrow. And that's it for today. Just remember: go ahead and be brutal with your tomatoes in the beginning so you don't wind up where I am, with a bunch of gangly hard to prune tomato plants that are driving you up a wall.
Happy Tomatoing!
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I was going to wait until after 30 days to prune my tomatoes, but it seemed like some of the bigger plants were crowding out the smaller ones and some were not getting enough light. So I decided to prune early. As I type this, it is Thursday. I pruned on Monday of this same week. So, how did it go? So here they are. The instructions I found said to use a pair of "kitchen shears." The scissors in the video look like the cheapest scissors you can buy in the sewing section of Wal Mart, so that's what I used. I had never used them for plants before, so I didn't wash them or anything. If I had trimmed some other plants first, I would have washed them or sterilized them first. I just started trimming. Basically, my thought was just to give the smaller plants some chance of getting some more light So here's the bunch of tomato plant branches. I shouldn't have set them down on the quilt, there's some green stuff (chlorophyll?) on there now. Aerogarden's "official" video on pruning says not to be scared of pruning because plants "love it." I'm sure they do. I'm sure it's fun for them to be hacked to bits by weird humans. While I was pruning, I noticed the buds! Oh ****, did I prune any buds off? Too late. I really didn't notice them. I don't think I did. Have I shocked the plants to the point that these buds will now never open? Oh Lord, the cheery lady in the Aerogarden video has led me down the "garden path!" I'm hyperventilating a bit at this point. So here's what it looks like on Monday after I pruned compared to today. I'm not sure it's better.. I'm hoping I'm imagining things and it doesn't actually look worse.
I'll put a link to the Aerogarden pruning video I watched in the resources section. This might be the last blog for a while if these things die. Saint Fiacre, pray for me. I'm gonna need it. The day it all started. February 19, 2021. Well, it actually started a week or so before, when my fiancé ordered me an Aerogarden as a Valentine's Day present. He knows I didn't inherit my grandfather's green thumb, and he had heard that this was a foolproof way of keeping plants alive, so this was a welcome present. Within minutes, my little seed pods were tucked away in their shiny metal-like guardian, bathing in their vitamin bath, safely away from my ministrations. Well, mostly, I have some things to do. But the directions promised that the Aerogarden would provide the plants the proper light, and that the thing would remind me when to put the plant food in and tell me if the water got too low. Feb 21, moisture starting to condense on the "seed dome." The domes are supposed to be "loosely" put on top of the seed pod things, but I found out that you have to make sure they're not too loose. If they're too loose, proper moisture won't condense and the plant will have a harder time. Thank goodness I saw a video about this early on, I knew to tape one of my seed domes down so a proper little greenhouse could develop. No sprouts yet on this day. FEBRUARY 24, A SEEDLING!!!!!! Well, that didn't take too long. February 26. Seedlings really took off. Plenty of moisture. March 2, domes off, plants seem to be generally happy. You're supposed to take the domes off before the seedlings start actually touching the domes. The label on one came off with the dome, it was loose anyway. Oh well, I don't think it matters. By the way, the one without the label was the one I was worried about because I had to tape down the dome because it wasn't "greenhousing" properly at first. It seems to be doing just fine. I saved the domes and the one label. I know the domes can be reused, the label I'm not so sure about. Also March 2. I guess this is plenty of roots? The plant seems to have no complaints about anything. A poster in a houseplant forum I belong to on Gab said that I need to make sure and trim the roots so they don't get caught in the water pump and clog it up. I'll have to keep a watch on that. March 3. Does it look any different that March 2? I'm not sure. Today, March 5. The plant food light was on this morning. Normally, you just take off the little cover over the small hole in the thing and pour the liquid food in the spot that they provide for you to do it. Because I'm a complicated person, and because I had been peeking and and seeing a lot of roots, I decided I had to make things more complicated than that. I took out the seedling tray and gave it a place to rest. This was also a test run for the one month mark where I am going to have to switch out the water and I wanted to have a plan for what I was going to do with the seedlings while I did that. I also took this opportunity to check the roots and trim a little a few of them. This Dollar Tree basket was **almost** the right size. It worked for now. I'm thinking making a frame that I can set in the sink and let the tomatoes chill there for a little bit while I change out the water. I'm not sure yet. The roots! They don't look like too awful much here, but when they're in the water they spread out considerably. One of the longest ones is right next to the pump. I wonder if it gets better water flow right there and grows better? I don't know. I'll try and remember to see if the ones further away from the pump have root systems that take longer to develop. I trimmed them just a tiny bit, I'm a little scared because of the aforementioned brown thumb. I'm not so concerned with the roots, really, it's pruning the top I'm worried about. That probably won't have to be done for a good long time. The pump hard at work. Sort of. It's not really that massive of a pump. Pretty quiet, really. Looks like a little dirt from the seed pods got in the water and is hanging out in the upper right area. I guess the water is that color from the plant food. I also topped off the water as it was just slightly down. I know this thing will tell me if the water gets too low, but that's another tip someone from the houseplant group said: Try to keep the water topped up more frequently, don't wait until it tells you to put water in. All happy now, the plant food light is green again. Sorry the picture is a bit blurry. I was done with this whole process at this point and wanted to eat my breakfast that I had forgotten about while I was preoccupied with the tomatoes. They got fed before I was! If you've followed me over from any of my crafty pages, then you might have read about my Jelly Bean Irish Chain Quilt. I figured it would make a nice cover for my Aerogarden table. It's washable, I don't think the Aerogarden is going to make too much mess, and it looks so nice under the lights! And it gives my quilt pride of place in the parlor. Whew!!!!That was a lot. That's only because I let so much time go by before I posted anything. I'll try not to let that happen again! I normally blog on Fridays on my main blog, I put out a short podcast on Anchor on Wednesdays, so I think I will make "Tomato Day" Thursday. Links for all this and resources on tips for growing and also money saving Aerogardening ideas will appear in the "Resources" section of this blog once I've got some together and can sit down and format it all. Ciao for now!
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AuthorJust a person growing stuff in an Aerogarden Archives
October 2021
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