Great Big Tomatoes To The Rescue!

Things have been so busy this spring that the garden has fallen a little behind. There are still lots of veggies growing out there, but I haven't been able to finish building the new raised beds that will allow me to grow almost twice the produce that I have in years past.

I'm still hopeful for the crops that start from seed, but I was getting pretty worried about all the tomato seedlings I had waiting in the greenhouse. Instead of waiting for the finished beds, I tilled a new area in the yard to accommodate a single row of tomatoes.

The plants are still pretty small, so maybe you can't see them in the above picture. Here is a closer look:

I was able to quickly mound up the soil so it is sort of like a raised bed. What this new row doesn't have that my beds do have is great soil. I add loads of compost to the raised beds. This tomato row is just the ordinary dirt from the yard. Since I don't use any chemical fertilizers, how am I going to keep these tomatoes healthy without compost? I'm using Great Big Tomatoes

Great Big Tomatoes is a wonderful product from the Great Big Plants company. I have used Great Big Plants for the past few years and wrote about it here.

Great Big Tomatoes is basically an organic concentrated liquid compost, rich in the nutrients that tomato plants need to grow big, healthy, and delicious. I just learned about Great Big Tomatoes and am excited about using it. All I have to do is mix a little in a gallon of water and use that to water my tomato plants. Easy.

I'll give you an update later in the summer when these plants are big and beautiful. I'm glad I was able to move some of these tomatoes out to this row method. When I do get my new beds finished, I will now have room for many other veggies. But I don't think I could have put my tomatoes in the new row without Great Big Tomatoes. I'm glad I found out about it.

Perfect Pepper!

For some reason, I have never been able to grow adequate bell peppers. I know, I know, peppers are easy to grow. Bell Peppers have never been easy for me. It's a curse. Well this year, the curse has been lifted!

It's a big and beautiful green pepper! To be exact it is a Park's Whopper bell pepper. We ate half of it in stir fry last night, and the other half in a salad today and it was delicious. The plants have several more almost ready too. So what did I do different this year? The only thing I can think of that helped break my curse is my Great Big Plants liquid compost that I got from greatbigplants.com.

You can read more about Great Big Plants in my previous post about it.

I can't wait till the next whopper pepper is ripe. The next one is getting grilled with some garden fresh onions! I'll stop there. This is supposed to be a gardening blog, not a cooking blog.

Happy gardening! (and cooking and eating!)

Organic Gardening and Great Big Plants!

My garden is an organic garden. I don't use any kind of chemical fertilizer or pesticides. I don't consider myself an environmentalist though and I don't try to make other gardeners feel guilty if they use chemicals. I simply think my flowers and especially my vegetables are far better by not using chemicals.

So what do I use for fertilizer? Lots of compost. I believe in feeding the soil instead of feeding the plants. A properly fed soil WILL feed the plants. I do have a bit of a problem however. I have expanded my vegetable, fruit and decoration gardens quite a bit this year and I don't have a sufficient amount of compost right now. Time for some 10-10-10 right? No way!

I am going to turn to a new product to help me out. It is an organic liquid compost enriched concentrate called Great Big Plants.

I have never tried it before but it sounds very promising. The company that makes it calls it "The Energy Drink for Plants". Here is a little of what they have to say about their Great Big Plants:

What's The Big Deal?
Great Big Plants is a concentrated organic liquid compost mixture that invigorates soil, producing maximum plant growth with minimum effort. The Big deal is bigger, brighter blooms; deeper, more emerald greens and plump, tastier fruits and vegetables.

I hope all of that is true. You can find much more information about the product at greatbigplants.com. In addition to using this liquid compost on my garden in general, just for fun I plan to grow a side-by-side comparison. I will use Great Big Plants on one side of a bed and not on the other. I will document and photograph the difference, and share the results in a future post.

I can't wait to get those early tomatoes that are in the picture's background planted outside. I will give them a boost with Great Big Plants so I can brag about them and many other plants on future Green Thumb Sunday posts. Happy Green Thumb Sunday! Be sure to visit other Green Thumb Sunday participants!

You can join too!