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You are here: Home / All blog posts / More tomato madness
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April 23, 2019 by Tien Chiu

More tomato madness

I just finished teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course! Or rather, I finished releasing all the lessons and did all the live lectures – some students are still finishing the exercises, and I’ll be giving feedback on the exercises through June. But the bulk of the work is done, and from now on I’ll be working primarily on revamping the current course offerings, developing new courses – and, of course, taking over the world through my killer mutant ninja tomato breeding project.

Which is coming along nicely, thank you for asking!

My Fruity Mix tomatoes were a little unhappy and chlorotic when they were set out into the garden two weeks ago. They looked like this:

a tray of Fruity Mix tomatoes waiting to be transplanted
Fruity Mix seedlings on 4/6/19

Two weeks later, they have settled in, greened up, and are preparing to take over the world:

Fruity Mix tomato on 4/22/2019
Fruity Mix tomato on 4/22/19

These are going to be a little crowded – I planted four per 30-gallon tub. My plan is to keep them pinched back to 2-3 stems each, and grow them up rather than letting them sprawl. My goal here is not to get a lot of fruit but to evaluate each plant for the quality of its fruit. I’ll likely cull a lot of the plants midway through the growing season, keeping only the best plants for saving seed. (And for tasty fruit!)

Because I decided to crowd the Fruity Mix four to a tub, I wound up having more space than I originally planned for. Which of course meant…more tomatoes! (I mean, what else would you expect me to grow?) So in addition to my 32 Fruity Mix tomatoes, I’m growing nine Fuzzy Mix (for breeding purposes…the fruits are essentially inedible), sixteen to twenty varieties for breeding (I kinda lost track of the exact number), and a bunch of microdwarf tomatoes, some of which are cool and exotic, like these:

A fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf tomato - with leaves so finely divided they look almost like carrot tops rather than a typical tomato leaf. Except they're furry!

This is a fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf. It’s hard to make out because of the fuzziness, but the leaves are very finely divided – beautiful and decorative! And it’s a microdwarf because it will get no more than 12″ tall. It’s a breeding project from Dan Follett – I’m growing it out partly to return feedback (and seeds) to him, but also to cross-breed it to Fuzzy Mix. I think it’s a beautiful little tomato plant! Can’t wait to see what the fruits look like.

The rest of the garden is going well, too. The garlic is growing like mad:

A big plot of garlic growing like crazy
lots of garlic!

The blueberries are blueberrying:

blueberries getting ready to ripen

The asparagus is also coming up (in spades!), the aprium is loaded with green fruit, our bird-of-paradise plant is blooming for the first time since we planted it, and the roses are going crazy, but no photos of those just yet…It is full-on spring in California, and I am scrambling to get on top of the weeds, put in stakes and supports, and set up the drip irrigation!

I am also weaving samples like crazy for my painted warp seminar at the ANWG conference in June…but this blog post is long enough already, so I’ll write about that in the next one. Suffice it to say that I’m up to 55 samples already and expect to be well over 100 samples by the time of the lecture…and would like to have 200+ by the time I finish developing the online course. Because one can never have too many samples!

I’ll leave you with a teaser photo of the samples. A cat heightens the mystery!

Tigress sitting on my samples
Tigress helping photograph samples

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Filed Under: All blog posts, garden Tagged With: tomatoes

Previous post: Robes of fire
Next post: Painted warp samples

Comments

  1. Sharon Mathews says

    April 23, 2019 at 7:19 pm

    Love reading your blog!
    I love tomatoes but to cross breed???
    I enjoy EATING them too much!

    • Tien Chiu says

      April 24, 2019 at 5:53 am

      LOL! Ah, but if you were growing 60+ tomato plants you might find you had enough to spare a fruit or two for breeding… 🙂

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