My Delicious Tomato has taken the lead!

I brought my tomato type Delicious on Sept 6 for official weigh-in, my first tomato entry for 2009. This one was grown from one of our Tomato Success Kits. Our visiting friends from North Tahoe, Duane and Lore obtained the official measurements to be 15" girth, weighing 17.7 oz. My Delicious now leads the contest, beating Dave's Watermelon Beefsteak that was entered a week ago.

Zack's and Louise's Tomato Garden - 2009

Our first competition tomato this year - type Delicious

We started many of our tomato plants this year from seeds out of last year's garden. Our first entry in this year’s competition is type Delicious, and is doing well in one of our tomato Success Kits, a type of self-watering container we bought on-line. There are more tomatoes on the vines that are still green and it looks like some of them can be competition tomatoes for this year's contest. Besides the two Success Kits, we have several plants on half-wine barrels, and also in-ground.

The Success Kits came with their own soil mix. I made my own mix for the wine barrel containers.

This year, we started our seeds using Aerogarden, a revolutionary indoor garden appliance. The seed starter kit for the Aerogarden had 72 pods, so I was able to grow other plants besides tomatoes. When the seedlings were about 4” tall I transplanted them to small pots to hardened them before they went in our garden.