Warm Season Vegetables Planted at Harvesters Garden

It's Mother's Day, the traditional weekend for planting tomatoes and other warm season vegetables in our area. Tomatoes need minimum soil temperatures of 50-55 degrees. Peppers like it even warmer.

Planting tomato seedlings outdoors too early can cause the plants to lag behind tomatoes planted later. That's because the plants will fail to set blossoms, or they will set and then most likely drop the blossoms. This may be a case where the early bird doesn't get the worm!

At the Harvesters Garden, we planted a variety of tomatoes in a row with plants 2-3 feet apart. We buried several inches of the stem of each tomato plant to boost the root system; tomatoes are one of the few plants that will root from the stem.

We'll mulch the tomatoes in a few weeks; mulching now would prevent the soil from warming up.

We also planted many kinds of squash in "hills" of about 7 seeds. Varieties included butternut, yellow straightneck and zucchini.
A row of pole beans was planted next to a trellis. The trellis is a "cattle panel" which we purchased at a local farm store. It's very sturdy so will easily support the pole beans that will climb on it.
This photo of the entire garden shows how the cool season plants we put in a month ago have really taken off. This weekend, we harvested lettuce for the first time this season!