My Tomato Harvest- The Number Game

So tomatoes are one of those crops that every gardener seems to want on their garden. I did too.

I had one hiccup only really... The neighborhood birds. Every time a couple would ripen..the feathery thieves  would come in and sample them. Behaving as fine tomato samplers, they only sample a piece out of each fruit, as if looking for the perfect one.

perfectly good tomato ruined by birds.

So I came up with a plan. I wanted to overwhelm the wild life with more tomatoes than it could handle. Hopefully after they had their fill there would be some left for me . Seeds are cheap anyways...

It worked..

Space wasn't a big problem for me. I don't have a huge backyard, but Tomatoes seem to like a wide array of soils. So go ahead and plant them around the perimeter of your property. Preferable if they are by a chailink fence that they can lean to for some support.





 I planted my seeds around October to give my plants time to grow during the colder South Florida weather. They don't seem to like the hotter  Florida months as much.

At this point I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves. I think it is safe to say that my local birds are ultra sick of tomatoes. The best part is that they have spread the seeds around so now I find that tomato plants are coming up virtually all over my property like weeds. Whenever they end up in a good spot I let them stay,.Bird assisted crop rotation!

oh yeah!

folks at my office were love my cherry tomatoes!

Haha now I'm just showing off.

So what's the lesson? Don't be so greedy dude...

Advertise Your Garden to Bees with Sunflowers

You need carpenter bees to cross pollinate your passion fruit...Carpenter bees are very attracted to sunflowers....so why not plant some sunflowers by your passion vines? Of course you can apply the same concept to any other crop that needs bee pollination. The thing about sunflowers is that they are huge and can "bee" spotted from a greater distance than more traditional flowers.

Fun fact: The sunflower is actually a large inflorescence. That means that the flower head is actually made of many tiny flowers called florets. Central florets look like the center of a normal flower while the outer florets look like yellow petals and together they make up a "false flower".

Sunflowers doing their thing by my passion vines

Keep on learning!