Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[yarrow@sfo.com]

At 6:50 AM -0700 1/30/10, Tradingpost wrote:
How did that cold frame work out with tomatoes and peppers?
>

The cold frame was a tomato cage placed horizontally on the ground, 
on top of some screening to keep out snails and slugs (ha!), wrapped 
in bubblewrap and surrounded by gallon water bottles (mostly for wind 
protection). I started them in mid-March, when the big rains were 
mostly over, and the temperatures didn't go below freezing iirc, or 
at least didn't stay below freezing for more than a few hours 
overnight. I opened the bubblewrap for ventilation on sunnier days, 
and closed it down for rainstorms. When I potted them up, I protected 
them with walls-o-water as well as additional cold frames 
(translucent plastic bins). I planted them out at the end of April in 
walls-o-water (removed at the end of May) and harvested the first 
ones in mid-July. (I also bought a couple seedlings in early March 
and had a few tomatoes beginning the end of May.)

I had pretty good germination of tomatoes, though they grew slowly. 
The peppers were even slower. The main problem was the slugs that got 
through and ate a few new seedlings before I noticed them. I 
sprinkled some cinnamon on some flats as a preventive antifungal.

It was a lot of work to grow from seed, but I had over a  hundred 
plants to give away and about 40 different varieties that I'd never 
find locally.