Posted by melannen on May 27, 2013 at 04:39

Remember that hopeful post I made about possibly some tomatoes coming up volunteer?

That has since developed into 'WTF DO I DO WITH ALL THESE TOMATO PLANTS'.

There were thirty-six of them over two inches high as of this afternoon, and increasing. I'm scared.

I got one of those upside-down tomato planters for my birthday, so I put two of them in there and hung it in the middle of the yard. (The process of hanging it in the middle of the yard involved everything from sawhorses to fire, mind you.) If it works as advertised - i.e., the upside-down planter making them twice as big as usual + the special potting soil I found in the shed making them twice as big usual + the eggshell I added making them twice a big as usual + these are children of The Plant That Ate The Greater Metropolitan Area - I may not have a yard left in a few months. Right now they look small and wilted hanging there, though, and if we get another frost ( wtf frost warnings on Memorial Day weekend? hello global climate change) they'll probably just die.

They had much less root than I was expecting (and than the instructions on the planter were expected - it assumed I'd have a storebought seedling with a solid rootball that it could hang from, hahaha no) and if the others are like that they can probably go another few weeks at this rate without thinning, so I'm going to put off figuring out what to do with them.. (these >36 tomato plants are in a two-foot-by-fifteen-foot flowerbed that also has squash, beans, and bunch of perennials, they can't all stay.)

Also I finally thinned the beets! They also look sad and tiny now and have less root than I expected; I hope I didn't damage them. I didn't have the heart to actually off the ones I thinned, so I ended up transplanting most of them out by the road. They mostly looked flat as of this evening though, so I'm not going to add them to the garden on here yet in case I jinx something.

The plants out by the road are in general looking pretty sad - the perennial and annual flowers we put out there usually do all right, so I don't know why vegetables just end up hangdog in that bed; it's a shame because it's one of the sunniest spots we've god. I've decided to start some weed tea and use that to water regularly out there, just in case that helps.

Also something is nibbling a couple of the bean plants but they're still putting out new leaves fast enough to keep up so I've decided not to worry about it yet.