Woman on the verge of tomatoes

A week ago I booted the chickens out of the basement for good (gently, naturally) after a week or so of hardening off. Yesterday I booted my tomato starts out of the basement (gently, naturally) after a week or so of hardening off. Not so different, really.

Planting out my tomatoes always feels like an endurance event, never more so than yesterday after an anatomy exam, lab, and studying.

My tomato planting process goes thusly:

1. Have husband dig wide deep hole. Dig a spade full of organic vegetable fertilizer into bottom of hole. Fill with water and let settle.
2. Plant leggy tomato start deep, up to the first true leaves. Fill in hole gently, then water well to allow the filled in dirt to settle.
3. Repeat with remaining 9 plants.
4. Mulch area around each plant with composted steer manure.
5. Have husband hammer a rebar stake (preferable for sheer durability) or bamboo stake (preferable for looks) into the ground within a few inches of the plant after warning him several times to not hurt the plants!!!
6. Place tomato cage around plant, not to actually hold the plant up (that's what the sturdy stakes are for), but to support the lynchpin of this whole setup...
7. The Wall-O-Waters! Place Wall-O-Water around each plant and spend what feels like one million years filling each little channel in with water, while stooped over in the most NON-ergonomic of positions. Stand upright every so often to rub lower back and complain a bit. When hose nozzle breaks not even halfway through the job, declare yourself to be a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and whine that you want a beer.

I think this is the year where I have officially come to hate Wall-O-Waters. But I love what they do, which is to remove much of the uncertainty about whether tomato plants will do well in our sometimes too-mild-for-their-liking Pacific Northwest summers. I've successfully grown hurking huge long-season heirloom tomatoes with the support of these turquoise beasts, so who am I to quibble. I even had a tomato-growing tip published in a recent issue of Mother Earth News, so I can't back down now.

Well, lower back pain and mental anguish nonwithstanding, the tomato planting is done for 2010, I had my cold beer (my only one for the week since I don't study Saturday nights...usually), and now I just have to vow to actually keep the tomato plants in line instead of letting them take over, as they usually do. And probably will again this year. (Sigh.)