Third Try at Tomatoes

Most of you know that I love home-grown tomatoes.  Just the best thing in the world - fresh, juicy, tasty and delicious.  What more could you ask?   Ventura has great weather for people, not so good for tomatoes which need heat.  Summer temps here are 65 to 75 degrees average and for a sweathog like me, it's wonderful.  I've tried for 8 years to grow tomatoes and, like our neighbors, never have a good crop.  Small tomatoes, few tomatoes.  The alternative is store bought ones that are picked green, turned red with propane gas and are hard, tasteless things.  If you could find anything resembling real ones, it would be at the weekly farmers markets and cost a fortune.  Nah, I'll build a greenhouse to grow them right.  So, in May, 2008, I did just that. 
Here's a photo of the beginnings:

At the end of our backyard, behind the garage is where I started.  I've never been good at exact measurements so I just planned in my head and measuring was kept at a minimum.  After a week of digging, some Internet ordered Greenhouse film and lots of trips to Lowes, it looked like this:

Then, in the next week, it all came together.  We have a large gopher population in the neighborhood so I had to dig the inside of the greenhouse down several feet and lay galvanized hardware cloth (coarse screening) to keep them out.  I dumped 27 bags of soil, peat moss, cow manure and mulch on top of the hardware cloth to fill up the planting area.  The inside growing area is about 6' by 6'.  Then, up went the roof and walls and door.  Finally, it was done:

It was now the middle of June, a month or so later than when I normally planted tomatoes but as you can see, inside the greenhouse, 5 plants are growing, along with several bell pepper plants.  The greenhouse worked well.  In a month, stuff was growing like crazy:

All 5 plants went crazy, growing to the roof and eventually fell over.  They smothered the bell pepper plants which I could never find again.  The tomato plants were continually loaded with big, red, juicy tomatoes.  Every weekend, I'd fill 4 or 5 plastic grocery bags - almost 20 pounds each. Wonderful tomatoes!  I shared them with neighbors and they agreed these were the best tomatoes in California, ever.  Finally, about the end of October, it was finished for the year. We had harvested hundreds of pounds of great tomatoes but the plants were starting to die.  I  ripped out what was left, cleaned the walls and waited for the coming year.  What a success!.

The following February - the 28th to be exact- I replanted the greenhouse in hopes that tomatoes would be on our table by May.  Here is the hopeful planting picture taken in April.  Only two plants this time and several bell peppers.

But it was not to be.  I had planted too early in the year and there was not enough sunlight to make the plants grow properly.  Yes, they grew tall and bushy thanks to fertilizer but were stunted or mutated by the lack of sun.  There were no tomatoes.  In June, I ripped everything out and started again.  As the summer progressed, we had heat wave after heat wave and the temperatue inside blew past 105 degrees daily, even with the door open and vents installed.  We were lucky to get 20 pounds for the entire season.  Such a disappointment.

I wanted to wait until the first of May this year before planting but was tempted by two 80 degree days this past weekend.  Against my better judgement, I started the 2010 growing season.  I hope things go better this time around.