More tomatoes and other things to plant

I went to the Topeka Farmers Market this weekend and bought six more tomato plants. Now that we've harvested the spinach and greens three times, and it's getting hotter, we decided to replace those crops with more tomatoes, squash and greens.

In addition to six more tomato plants, we got kale, collard greens, Lakota squash, zucchini,

New additions

muskmelon, acorn squash and butternut squash. One of our neighbors has a booth at the market and he gave us a great deal on the plants and threw in a couple for free so we picked the Lakota and the muskmelon. We weren't necessarily planning to plant these things but because of our recent success, we have become slightly addicted to growing our own food. We thought, if we could grow that other stuff, why not this stuff?

Back to the tomatoes. We got six different types, because we just couldn't get the same kinds we already have. We want to try many different varieties, and we were able to find some so that worked out for us well. I tried searching all the varieties on the Tomato Chooser app, but they weren't all on there. I'm not sure what that means, but I still bought varieties that weren't on the app because the lady selling them did a good job. Below is a list and a description of each variety of tomato we picked.

Cherokee Purple -- a medium-sized slicer that turns a dark purple but lighter-colored at the stem.

Sunrise Bumblebee -- a yellow to red cherry tomato. These vary in color on the inside and the outside and are sweet.

Lemon Boy -- a medium-sized yellow tomato. I believe we got some of these from some friends last year and they a late maturing, and will be ready after most other tomato plants are done for the season. We canned a lot of them and that seemed to be a great storage method for this type of tomato.

Pink Tiger -- an elongated cherry tomato, these look like their namesake, with tiger-like stripes on the little fruits. I really want to get a dehydrator and do sun-dried tomatoes, the Tomato Chooser app says this variety is best dried.

Sunpeach -- This kind is another cherry tomato. The descriptions say it's a sweeter, less acidic cherry tomato.

Brandywine Burgundy -- this tomato is a sister of the brandywine tomato. It's going to be a dark purple slicer that could grow as large as 1 lb.

Tumbling toms

We also bought a hanging basket of Tumbling Tom tomatoes. They looked pretty healthy and like the plant would yield a lot, and this plant already had a bunch of red fruit on it. We picked some for dinner tonight on our fresh garden greens. I ate a couple and they are sweet, juicy and a little meaty.

I look forward to planting these new plants in our garden and even more to them growing. Gardening has proven to be exciting and fruitful -- literally!

The tomatoes we planted a couple weeks ago are coming along nicely. The Early Girls are producing new fruit daily, and there is one tomato starting to turn orange/red. The other plants are flowering, which means fruit is coming soon.

The basil I planted by seed is coming up and thriving. The pineapple sage has doubled in size and the

My herb container with a variety of basil, pineapple
sage and thyme.

Siam Queen basil is coming along nicely, too. I started pulling off the purple flowers to promote new, bushy growth at the base of the plant and it worked. I have a few new shoots coming off with new leaves that will probably end up in dinner one night.

A couple days ago, I added some plant food to my soil around the tomato plants. It's been a few weeks and I felt like they needed some food. The leaves were turning yellow on our pepper plants, but ever since I fed them, they've greened back up again. So, I must have done something right!