Everything You Never Wanted to Know about...

...Tomatoes.

Last year, I bought three plants at a TOMATOMANIA! (http://tomatomania.com) event at Descanco Gardens (http://www.descansogardens.org/) in La Canada-Flintridge. If you view the map below, you can see that's about 46 miles away from my home. This year, I found that same tomato crazy event is going to be held at Roger's Garden's (http://rogersgardens.com/) in Corona Del Mar, which is so much closer.

But, hearing about how my Rideshare buddy just planted strawberries in her grandmother's community garden, I thought I might try to grow some this year in a container.

So, I went container shopping last weekend at this place called Pottery Manufacturing and Distributing (http://potterymfg.com/) Their name says it all. And it's all they do. The place is chock full of pottery. It's great. It's right off the 110 Freeway in Gardena. I found it because I drive that way home from work sometimes.

I was able to locate a beautiful 14 plant container in cobalt blue. Then I trotted over to my local Armstrong Garden Center and found enough strawberry plants to fill my new container. Fast forward to an impending storm, and by the time I got all of my purchases home, it was too cold to plant. I pulled the plants inside last night to prevent them from freezing. Yes, it was that cold. On the news, the snow levels were reported at 3000 feet. That makes Orange County a mighty cold place to be. How cold? As I type this blog, it's 43 degrees. That's cold enough to set off my car's road ice warning.

O.K., so back to the tomatoes. So my three tomato plants from last year died this past weekend. I wasn't sad about loosing the Beefsteak or the Pink lady because, to be honest, they just didn't perform like I thought they should have. Maybe I was giving them too much water because they were planted in a Topsy Turvy, or maybe I didn't feed them enough high test chicken poop AKA Tomato Tone (http://www.espoma.com/p_consumer/tones_tomato.html). I don't know. But the star of the three plants was the Chika Japanese Cherry Tomato plant. That thing grew like gangbusters and had a good amount of fruit. In a last ditch effort, I harvested all of the green and semi green cherry tomatoes and seeded them. Then I read this:
http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/grow-tomato.htm

So now I have a glass bowl of unplanted tomato seeds.