The MurrTudi Homestead

On the Seattle Urban Farm and Coop Tour last weekend we visited a house over near Madison Ave that had quite an impressive garden and produced meat and held farm to table dinners and everything. Very cool- 41 Legs Farm. They manage to make enough money selling extra plant starts and garlic to fund their gardening hobby, and take donations for their farm dinners to cover those costs. Very, very cool. Kinda want to be like them when I grow up.

In addition to being impressed with and jealous of their huge city lot and nice set up, I learned a new technique for growing tomatoes. They had their tomatoes trimmed down to one or two leaders and strung up vertically on tall supports (which I’ve seen before- I think most commercial tomatoes are grown this way) but they had also trimmed the lower leaves off the vine to allow more air circulation between the plants and prevent disease. They had some rule of thumb like for every foot above four feet the plant reaches, trim off one foot of leaves from the bottom, or for every 2 feet of growth, trim off 1 foot of branches below… Can’t quite remember.

This weekend I did the same for my tomatoes… Kind of. I don’t follow the trim to two leaders rule, but I do trim out suckers, especially on indeterminant (sprawling) plants so mine end up with 4-5 leaders each. I tied closeline-like cords from the garage to the tree across the top of the garden bed (stronger than tying individual plants to individual posts) and hoisted long floppy vines up off of the tomato cages. Then David helped me remove the wall o’ waters that have been around the plants since transplant.

Side note: Last year we left the wall o’ waters on all season because they’re hard to get off once the plants are so big, but the fruits that grow within the wall o’ waters invariably get eaten by snails who think it’s cozy in there. This year we slit the wall o’ waters open- linearized them like a plasmid, if you will- and slinked them out from under the bushes. Next time we use them we’ll have to circularize them with clips, but they’ll be easier to put on the plants that way too!

Next I clipped off all of the leafy branches growing within the tomato cages- up to about a foot and a half off the ground. I left the fallen leaves on the soil under the plants (apparently tomatoes like to eat the composted bodies of their fallen comrades) and then spread a layer of hay on top to insulate the soil even more from water loss.

The bed looks good now- the vines will get more light because they’re not piled on top of each other, the plants will get more air between them and hopefully we’ll have fewer losses to snails and rot, and we can actually see where the fruits are to pick them!