Putting Things Off 'Til the Last Minute

I'm talking about the fall tomato crop.  Last fall we had a tremendous fall harvest of tomatoes.  Tricia informed me today that she used the last of the frozen tomatoes in our lunch.  As I looked out on our back patio, I see the seed pots containing 56 tomato plants.  Actually, the photo below shows 32 plants because I transplanted 24 of them into the garden yesterday on a very hot afternoon.

See, that's the main reason for the procrastination - the hot, dry summer we're experiencing.  The month of August and so far, September have proven to be so hot and dry, everything is just baking out there.  It is a terrible time to plant anything in the garden, except a cactus, maybe.  I kept hoping we'd get a good soaking rain or a cool front, but none seems to be coming.  The tomatoes are getting so long and leggy.  It's time to get them in the ground.

So yesterday I got a post hole digger and 12 Cherokee Purple tomato plants and 12 Pink Brandywine tomato plants and headed out to the garden.  I picked a space between two garden rows I planted in the spring.  In this way, it's sort of like rotational planting in that you're not planting the same type plant in the same soil year after year.

I dug holes with the post hole digger and dug them deep.  You can plant tomatoes real deep and the stem sends out roots.  This eliminates the "leggy" problem.  Once I put the plant in the hole, I backfill the hole with soil and composted chicken litter.  I put mulch around the soil at the base of the plant to combat evaporation and then I watered each plant in real good.  Finally, I started the sprinkler going to really soak the soil to give the plants a good chance at making it.

A day later, I checked in on them.  Two don't look too good and one had all the leaves eaten off of it by some critter.  Hopefully, they'll make it, but we have 56 plants in total.  I always plan to lose some.  I'll plant the remainder maybe tomorrow or the next day.