Tomato Tuesday 2015/2

Week 2. I'm still trying to figure out best vantage points and so forth for the photographs. Here is our duo. Again, Michael Pollan is on the left and Cherokee Purple is on the right.

Due to the drought I'm trying to water the tomatoes every two or three days, rather than daily. Though honestly I kind of wonder why I'm being so careful when I see people around here hosing down sidewalks, washing cars, running sprinklers on their lawns and so forth, just as if we've actually had adequate amounts of rain in the past four years. Anyway: I'll see how the water reduction goes. It's been OK this week, partly because it's mostly been cloudy and cool – not just in the morning, but all day. We were promised some rain one night, though it turned out it's wasn't even enough to cover the bottom of a bucket I left out.

I might need to increase the watering when it gets hotter and sunnier, which is probably about the time they'll start cutting off water (I don't know what else is going to get people's attention). I do put old torn-up newspaper in the pots with the compost, because I think the paper retains water. I use the San Francisco Examiner for this purpose, since it is printed with soy-based inks on recycled paper and besides is free. I only take one per day, I should point out, because I am the sort of considerate person there should be more of.

This is a solo shot of Cherokee Purple. As of Sunday 17 May it was about 10 1/2" high (not to its very top, but to the top of its main stem). Maybe I should try putting a sheet behind these when I take the pictures.

And this is a solo shot of Michael Pollan; as of Sunday 17 May it was about 9 1/2" high (again, to the top of its main stem). It is more slender than Cherokee Purple. It is also in a smaller pot. There are two different sizes of pot I use. I prefer the larger ones (and so do the tomato plants, I suspect) but they are more expensive and occasionally I interrupt my habitual self-indulgence with semi-pointless economies, and that's where the smaller pots come in. I have experimented with growing tomatoes right in the ground, too, but I consistently get better results from the pots, possibly because of the concentration of high-quality compost that each tomato gets all to itself.