Archives for the month of: May, 2012

it’s has been just over a month since planting dave jr. and because i am a newbie to growing tomatoes, i have relied on the interwebs to teach me a thing or two about making him be big, strong and bear beautiful flavorful fruit. there is conflicting advice about whether or not to prune flowers and/or branches at all. one article i read said that it would teach him to continue to grow more flowers, and not bear fruit too soon when he wasn’t strong enough to hold them up. seemed like good advice. i chose to pluck the flower buds until just recently.

most suggested to remove the ‘suckers’ which start to grow in the v between the main stem and other branches. of course, since i didn’t come upon this information until a couple weeks in, the base of dave jr. has become quite full. right around the time i stopped plucking flowers, some yellow leaves started to appear, which concerned me.

i worried i was watering him too much, but after reading more, it could be because i haven’t been watering him enough, there aren’t enough nutrients in his soil, or perhaps he even has a virus. so today i added crumbled up egg shells (for calcium), and some fertilizer (nitrogen) to the top and cultivated it in, gave him a good watering, filled up his reservoir, and trimmed the yellow branches and leaves.

dave sr. didn’t know what kind of tomato dave jr. would produce. the good news is that almost every main branch has flowers on it or at least little tiny buds on them, so hopefully that means lots of fruit this summer, whatever kind that might be.

the anticipation is killing me.

i got together with a friend today to go hiking. we decided to go up to the griffith observatory.

we ended up parking on fern dell right across from the trails, a cute little cafe that serves pie, and other good stuff.

i’m not going to lie, pie was on my brain the whole way up and down our hike. by the time we made it back down, they only had one slice left…apple.

this was fitting, since it was their apple pie that began my obsession with pie a few years back, and even got me to enter the first annual kcrw good food pie contest. we also got delicious stumptown coffee, oh and a vanilla lavender shortbread cookie to go, and by ‘to go’ i mean to go in our bellies.

the pie was even better than before, mostly because when i had my first slice here they kept the skins on the apple (which is not my preference), but the crust was perfection per usual, and no skins this time.

it was a lovely way to end a really nice hike, and though it negated any calories burned, it made me very, very happy.