You may remember that I don’t garden… It generally just doesn’t agree with me.

Despite this fact, I decided awhile back to plant tomatoes. Its been pretty dry lately, so I’ve been watering them twice a day. But apparently not enough , because the leaves still managed to look wilted during the hottest parts of the day, and my tomatoes started to get dark and hard on the bottom.

I called my garden-loving parents for advice.

Turns out my tomatoes had something called blossom-end rot. Lovely sounding, isn’t it.

I guess tomatoes need a lot more water than I was offering them. An inch or more a day, I guess. And a consistent water supply too.

So, I picked off the affected tomatoes… 7 altogether. And drowned the poor plants in water. And added some grass clippings over the soil in attempt to get the moisture to stay in better. And now I’m hoping that it hasn’t spread to the other fruit. I may also go pick up some calcium chloride to spray the plants.

And I guess I need to water even more. Dave suggested “irrigating” or drowning the plants every few days to make sure the soil has plenty of water. And I was talking to a friend that said she had heard that if the soil at the edges of the pot (yes, I planted my tomatoes in pots) isn’t wet to the touch then they don’t have enough water. I wonder if I can get some sort of water IV for the plants. Heh!

This is entirely too much work for someone that hates gardening. lol!

If you want to know more about blossom-end rot, here are a few handy links:
http://msucares.com/newsletters/pests/infobytes/19990707.htm
http://en.mimi.hu/gardening/blossom_end_rot.html
http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Tomato_BlossRt.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_deficiency_(plant_disorder)

P.S. The flowers from my last gardening post are still mostly alive – and few have died though. I think they would have blossom-end rot too, if they knew how. Sigh! I guess its good that it rained.