Planting Tomatoes

I did my container gardening a little differently this year - I usually do the square foot method (click here for one of my posts on that from last year) and plant all kinds of different things in the squares. Standing in the garden center tho I realized what I really want to grow and love to eat from the garden are tomatoes (lots and lots of tomatoes!), and both Lucy the parrot and Sarge love green beans and peas (she gets so excited when I pick beans and peas and bring them in for her - she grabs them right out of my hand and chomps them, then Sarge eats what she throws on the floor)...so all I'm growing is those 3 things.

 I have 10 tomato plants, 6 each of beans and peas...I read in a book about someone planting tomatoes in paper bags but when I googled I couldn't find info about how to do that, but I did find this technique to plant the tomatoes sideways so I did that with a couple of the plants and I'll let you know how that goes later in the season. They say it helps the roots grow stronger and that roots will form along the stem that is planted in the dirt...in order to plant them sideways and not break the tops (you have to sort of bend them up and out of the ground) just leave the plants in their original growing container on their side for a couple days, they'll naturally start to curve towards the sun making the job of planting sideways simple.

dig a trench and lay the plant in it on it's side, leaving the top out of course.

I also discovered what went wrong last year with a couple of the plants (the fruit was black and weird on the bottom), it's blossom-end rot and comes from inconsistent watering - which of course is totally my fault! I'm going to do better this year :).

Before planting I amended the soil by adding a little "dairy doo" which is basically manure and is supposed to make a big difference - we'll see...