The picture shows the status of the tomato plants that I planted on January 5. They will be ready to transplant to 4″ pots next week. Then in a couple of weeks before I leave for a trip to New Zealand they will be transplanted to 1 gallon containers. I may go ahead and plant some directly with a frost cloth wrapping. Wrapping works well for tomatoes and peppers for Houston vegetable gardening.
The Packman broccoli planted around October 1 is now being harvested. Fennel planted at the same time is also ready. Mustard greens continue to produce faster than we can eat them. They have lasted longer this year by picking the leaves when they are still relatively small. I have much better luck with Florida Broadleaf Mustard than with the curly varieties. In addition to the traditional southern way of cooking (and over cooking) them, I use them is soups with lentils and also by lightly stir frying with onion and then steaming for a few minutes. They are more bitter with the shorter cooking.
This weekend (January 6) I planted tomatoes under the grow light (see description). Tomatoes need to be started early for Houston gardens. Today on January 9 they are already coming up. This year I planted Sweet Chelsea, Sungold, Champion, Merced and Celebrity. Sweet Chelsea is a great plum or large cherry tomato that does exceptionally well here. It is red on the outside but greenish on the inside. Sungold is a yellow or orange cherry tomato, although I may be insulting the cherry community as it is quite small. It is very good for adding a little color to a salad and is very flavorful and very productive. I tried Champion last year with rather poor results but decided to give it another try because it is recommended for the area. Merced and Celebrity are hybrid slicers that do well but the flavor is not outstanding. I planned to plant Carnival instead of one of them but could not find the seed locally and I procrastinated too long to mail order. Now that Urban Harvest is dropping its seed selling function, I will get organized and order all my seed next year.
Bob Randall characterizes tomatoes as difficult even though we raised them commercially about 100 miles west of here when I was a kid. The soil in Lavaca County is more suitable than Houston gumbo however. See a previous post on how we raised tomatoes then. I do a lot differently now. For example, I do not spray them with arsenic!