Tomato Bed In!

I spent a few hours today digging up and planting my tomato bed (finally)! I started by double digging the area (2ft x 18ft). I only dug down about 8 inches or so because the dirt was already pretty loose and I was in a rush. I mostly just wanted to mix in the grasses and weeds that had grown and died (thanks to round-up) since last year.

Then the tomatoes went in. There are 10 tomato plants with 21 inches between each. On each plant I snipped off any branches besides the top three-ish. Before burying I dipped each root ball in kelp emulsion to give them a nutrition boost. Then each plant went into a trench with the stem placed close to horizontal and bent up at the end so the couple inches left above ground are vertical. This supposedly encourages quick root growth, but, more important to me, it allows me to have the plants come out of the ground only a couple inches from the chain link fence/trellis without cramping their roots.

Lastly, I planted patches of garlic and shallots between each pair of tomatoes. There are 6 elephant garlic cloves with 6 shallots planted in front of each, 3 patches of 7 garlic cloves, and 2 patches with 5 garlic cloves. So that's a total of 37 garlic plants (6 are elephant garlic) and 36 shallot plants. Spacing within each patch was eye-balled (again...in a rush) at about 4-5 inches. Depth was 1-2x the height of the clove/shallot. Many of the garlics and shallots were already sprouting, so I expect to see them putting up leaves (stalks?) soon.

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