I'm more than a little impressed. In five years, this high school teacher has gone from growing a few tomatoes for himself to full on semi-pro nursery.
Growing tomatoes and whatnot from seed in his greenhouse and a grow box made with a discarded glass door and some 2x4s, he's able to fund his own gardening addiction, do missionary work (addicting others), and to hear him tell it provide him with hours of pleasantly diverting tasks nursing the seedlings along and separating them into 2500 Styrofoam cups.
He showed me his rain barrel setup and drip irrigation fed by it, his raised beds and gave me absolutely gobs of advice about how to set up a raised bed that works on the cheap and where to get good compost in bulk.
I'm going to have to try some of the many varieties of basil he's got on offer, too.
My Tomatosaurus Rex plans have already been revised heavily in light of his advice. I'm not going to give the Micro Tom that only gets six inches tall its own plot in the garden when I can grow it in a pot. I'll add another indeterminate in its place in all likelihood. And since discovering that my railroad ties are both more rotten and harder to move than I anticipated, my one long bed has been replaced by three 4x8's.
I really love these 'Texas' cages. They're collapsible, made of stainless steel and designed to interlock so you can stack as many as you need for a monster indeterminate like the Mortgage Lifter. At $22 a unit, I don't see any coming to my garden this year, I'm trying to figure out if I can build a cage out of PVC on the cheap or if I'm stuck with trying to come up with a robust staking system.
Not that I have to worry about cages yet. It's too early to put the plants out even if I tried to get him to sell them already. And even if he did sell them to me, they haven't outgrown a coffee cup yet.
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