Every year I like to try something different in my garden. This year’s experiment was to take crops that I would normally start indoors and direct seed them. Because of cool weather it took the seed a while to come up, but all 10 varieties that I tried eventually germinated. The variety in the photo is a Moskvich tomato which I am trying because of its crack resistance. On May 22nd, these tomatoes were only 4″ tall and I was starting to believe that my experiment might not turn out so well. The photo above was taken on June 3rd and with the warm weather the tomatoes have really started to take off. In just 12 days they grew 8 to 10 inches! It now seems possible that I will get a full crop of tomatoes without the extra effort of starting the seed indoors and transplanting. Now that the weather is settled I have removed the Thermal Plant Protectors and I will let you know when I start harvesting tomatoes!