Lunar Tomatoes

The real clincher, what sealed the deal and set me firmly on my lunar gardening journey, was my lunar tomatoes. I’d been gardening by the moon for about a year, when I caught tomato fever.

 

I believe that at some point, every gardener catches it. Once you’ve tasted your first garden tomato, there’s no going back, and there’s a whole universe of taste and texture to explore, endless varieties to grow… only limited by time and space (and money!). At the peak of my tomato mania, I planted 16 varieties one year… I’ve gotten over the worst of my problem, and now restrict myself to six (or eight at the most!)

Tomatoes are heat lovers, and here in Southern California, we sow seeds in February so that we have seedlings to transplant into the garden in April for summer harvesting. The second year I grew tomatoes, (I’d caught the bug and decided to get serious!), I went to one of my favorite gardening teachers, David King at The Learning Garden, for advice. David runs The Learning Garden at Venice High School, and teaches class there every Saturday, so I went to his class on tomatoes, which happened to be exactly a week before the date that I had planned to sow my tomato seeds according to the lunar calendar. Perfect timing, I thought.

The class was great, we got tips on how to transplant tomato seedlings to get the best root development*, and we sowed seeds of several varieties of tomatoes into a pony pack that we took home.

I set that tray on a heated seed mat, and a week later, I seeded more trays with the seeds I’d ordered and set them next to the first tray. I had bought the same brand of soil David recommended for starting seeds. I then proceeded to treat all the seed trays in the exact same way.

The seedlings were transplanted twice, first into 4 inch pots, then into quart sized pots, before being transplanted into the ground in mid-April.

I didn’t have any specific expectations of these plants. I was happy and excited to have gotten six free varieties from David’s class, and couldn’t wait to see how these would all taste.

Because all the plants were growing right next to each other, I couldn’t avoid seeing that the seeds I’d sown a week later, on the optimal day according to the lunar calendar, were growing better and faster than the ones I had sown with David a week earlier!

Those seedlings grew into stronger, taller plants, that proceeded to do better in the garden, and gave way more tomatoes! No doubt about it! No further experiments needed…from now on, I’m only growing lunar tomatoes!

•  In order to get the most tomatoes and the most vigorous plant, you need the best root system you can manage. Tomatoes are peculiar in that, along their stems they have hairy filaments that can develop into roots. (*See top picture*) When transplanting the seedlings, unlike most other plants that should always be transplanted at the same root level they were growing, tomatoes should be buried deeper, up to the level of the first leaves, so that more roots will form along the stem. You’ll notice that I transplanted my tomatoes into pots twice, each time burying the stem deeper. The trick I learned from David applies to the final transplanting into the ground. In order to really maximize root development, and because tomatoes are such heat lovers that their roots like to stay close to the surface, David taught us to actually lay the plants down horizontally in a trench, pinch off all but the top cluster of leaves, then gently bend the stem upward to the surface, achieving a 90 degree curve, before filling the trench back up and burying the plant up to the leaf cluster.