For most of the past week, I was away from the garden. The weather changed abruptly, and after a few warm weeks, we again had an episode of cold, rainy, and windy days. Of course, as soon as we get rain that lasts a couple of days, it takes at least 48h for the garden to dry enough to be able to enter it. Still, I wasn’t too upset since I’ve done everything that had to be done, and honestly I needed a break. I thought that after the break I will just dig the garden again and that would be it, but I didn’t count on the tomato’s ability to grow.

This year I’m growing my tomatoes differently. I used to grow my tomatoes the traditional way: on a wooden pole and two tomatoes around the pole. Last year I’ve noticed that the tomatoes which grew in a straight line and were just tied with strings grew stronger and bigger than the normally grown ones.

So, this year, I decided to plant all of them this way. I’ve asked my hubby to place 6 big poles in a vertical line, and I’ve planted tomatoes between these poles. The planting itself was much simpler since there was no need to dig individual holes. I’ve just dug a trench, placed the seedlings inside, and covered them with soil. Also, I didn’t have to break the stomach muscles by sticking dozens of poles in the ground. Most of the poles were rotten anyway and I’d need dozens of new ones, which I have no idea where I’d find.

The tomatoes between big poles worked out well so far. As soon as they grew bigger I added another circle of rope around them and secured the rope with tiny rope pieces close to the plant. This way the plants can’t move too much when we have a storm, but they still need to rely on each other for support. This makes the plants much firmer.

The tomatoes have been growing at a slow, steady pace. The temperatures have probably been a bit too high for the plants to have that initial growth boost, but I wasn’t too worried about that. The plants looked dark green, and healthy, and even started producing flowers and fruits already. Also, the neighbor’s tomatoes are a bit shorter than in previous years, so I know that in this extremely warm spring this is a normal thing.

But as I said the situation during the past couple of days changed and we got a lot of rainy and cooler weather. Actually, during the first 13 days of June, we got more rain than in most of the winter and spring months combined. Also, the rain wasn’t just pouring and slipping away from the garden like in previous storms, the past couple of times the rain fell for a long period, wetting the soil well.

This woke up my tomatoes and they went wild during the past week. I managed to get in the garden on Saturday and I was pretty surprised to see how much they grew. I had to untangle most of them from the improvised anti-hail netting.

The plants grew so much that some of them managed to bend to the ground. I can honestly say that the sturdy stem is much firmer than in previous years, I actually couldn’t bend the plants back up, I just left them to grow like they were, and secured them in the position they preferred. It’s not like I’ll be pruning too much this year anyway.

The reason why I will not do excessive pruning this year is that I have no idea which tomato variety is where. I did the mistake of writing the labels with what I thought was a waterproof pen. It turned out to be a washable one, and now I have no idea which tomatoes are determinate, which are indeterminate, and which are cherry tomatoes. I can’t prune the tomatoes if there’s a chance the plant could be determinate. Determinate tomatoes shouldn’t be pruned or they won’t throw the second batch of flowers, and I love the second harvest. This is why I will not force pruning this year. I’ll just remove the branches that are disturbing the fruits and I’ll probably remove the lower branches if we get blighty weather. I prefer quantity over the size of the tomatoes anyway. We consume our tomatoes fresh, and it’s better to have dozens of smaller ones than a couple of bigger ones that we’ll gobble up in a couple of days. So this year suckers are more than welcome in the new tomato regime.

Also, this year, I have a marigold fence around the tomatoes, and the flowers seem to enjoy this spot. I can honestly say that I’ve never had such early-blooming marigolds in the garden. The ones planted next to the tomatoes are much bigger than the rest of the plants which I have all around the garden. I’ve planted marigolds next to the tomatoes just because they looked pretty together in the other people’s gardens. I don’t have the necessity of doing this. There aren’t any tomato pests here in my part of the country. We don’t have a problem with pollinating insects deficiency, there are so many insects that you can see them in the sky all the time, and also I don’t have a big snail problem. We don’t have many snails here, there are a couple of them every year in the garden, but they have more delicious things that they can gobble up before the tomatoes. So my marigolds are primarily there to look pretty and that’s it, and I think they are doing a good job.

I’ve rolled away the protective netting for now since there’s no real hail danger right now, but it’s still here in case of an emergency, at least until the real netting gets here. We’ve ordered 450m2(4844 sq ft) of protective netting which we’ll place on top of the garden, but until it gets here the improvised netting will be protecting the tomatoes. In case of a damaging storm, the rest of the veggies still have time to recuperate, but the tomatoes would be lost for this year.

Hopefully, the protection will be here only as an ornament, and I won’t need it this year.